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Arrested development: neoliberalism and the rise of the slacker in the 20th and 21st century United States

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Arrested development: neoliberalism and the rise of the slacker in the 20th and 21st century United States

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Content ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT: NEOLIBERALISM AND THE RISE OF THE SLACKER IN THE 20TH AND 21ST CENTURY UNITED STATES by Alex Wescott –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) August 2014 ii Acknowledgements That a project about slackers would take so much work was somewhat unexpected. That it will continue to take work and go through further stages of development suggests to me that, ultimately, the normative expectations and demands of intellectual production will lead me down a path similar to many of the slackers discussed throughout this dissertation. While I am often critical of these figures, I cannot help but look forward to the work that awaits me. I would like to extend my sincerest gratitude to my committee members, Karen Tongson, Jack Halberstam, Tania Modleski, and Josh Kun, for their patience, support, encouragement, and guidance. I am forever indebted to Karen Tongson, who has provided me with a model for the kind of scholar I would like and hope one day to become. During times of uncertainty and insecurity, Karen has helped me to see my potential and I will forever strive to realize it. David Lloyd and Curtis Marez were crucial during the early stages of this project and provided insights and suggestions that shaped my research and my thinking. My thanks to the University of Southern California Department of English for providing me with funding throughout my tenure as a graduate student. I thank the English department for a fellowship that gave me time to research and draft portions of this project during the 2011-2012 academic year. This project could not have been completed without the additional time and funding provided by the USC Graduate School's Dissertation Completion Fellowship. iii None of this would have been possible without Flora Ruiz, whose kindness and expert guidance through the trials and tribulations of university bureaucracy ensured my graduation. To my friends and colleagues at USC, who shared in the struggles of graduate life, I offer my thanks: José Navarro, Alexis Lothian, Raeanna Gleason, Gino Conti, Chris Belcher, Mary Ann Davis, Saba Razvi, Jen Ansley, Sophia Azeb, Charlie Shipley, Margarita Smith, Trisha Tucker, Erika Wenstrom, April Davidauskis, Matthew Carillo- Vincent, Jennifer Barager, Domino Torres, Josie Sigler, Genevieve Yue, and Yetta Howard. Special thanks to my noona Patty Ahn. To anyone left off of this list, my humblest apologies and I hope you can forgive my forgetfulness. Beyond USC, I would like to thank Jennifer Doyle, Molly McGarry, Heather Lukes, and Raquel Gutiérrez for their behind-the-scenes support. Special thanks to the contributors to the Social Text: Periscope dossier on "Work and Idleness in the Age of the Great Recession": John Andrews, Kathi Weeks, Gregory Dobbins, Karen Tongson, Genevieve Yue, Jac Asher, Elizabeth Freeman and Peter Coviello. Additional thanks to Social Text's editors Ashley Dawson and Tavia Nyong'o. Elsa Clark: Thank you for introducing me to Studs. Thanks especially to my parents, Arthur and Kyong Chun Wescott, who taught me the value of hard work. And my sincerest thanks to my brother William for regularly helping me to resist, and sometimes forget, what our parents taught us. To my sister-in- law Jenna for her kindness and for regularly putting my life as a graduate instructor into much needed perspective. To my niece Layla, for reminding me recently to "Let It Go." iv Finally, to my partner Artemisa Clark: there are no words to express my gratitude and love, not even Extreme's 1990 single will suffice. Thank you for getting songs stuck in my head and for not holding it against me when I return the favor. You have been with me not only during the most difficult stages of this project but in every moment in between, and I’m going to somehow make it all up to you. But for now, some random words to express my love: muppets, hax0rz, 1337, cabbage. v CONTENTS Acknowledgments ii List of Figures vi Abstract vii Introduction 1 1 No Future: The Reagan Revolution, Back to the Future, and the Politics of Potential 28 2 "Oh Well, Whatever, Nevermind: Generation X and the Ambivalence of Disenchantment 71 3 "Smells Like Teen Spirit": Extended Adolescence, Bromance, and Oedipal Acculturation in Knocked Up 113 4 Winning the War on Drugs: Race, Assimilation, and Terror in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay 163 Epilogue 196 Bibliography 215 vi List of Figures Figure 1 “You’re a slacker!” Back to the Future. Universal, 1985. 37 Figure 2 “No Future.” Back to the Future. Universal, 1985 41 Figure 3 “…the rest of my life with him.” Back to the Future. 43 Figure 4 McFly Family Living Room, circa 1985a. 50 Figure 5 McFly Family Living Room, circa 1985b. 50 Figure 6 McFly Family, circa 1985a. 51 Figure 7 Linda and Dave McFly, circa 1985b. 51 Figure 8 George McFly, circa 1985a. 52 Figure 9 George and Lorraine McFly, circa 1985b. 52 Figure 10 “If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.” 56 Figure 11 “Department of Social Services.” 58 Figure 12 “What-EVER.” Clueless. Paramount Pictures, 1995. 74 Figure 13 “Generation X.” Illustrated by Paul Rivoche. Vista, 1989. 77 Figure 14 “I’m having a life.” Generation X (142). 107 Figure 15 Sliders. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. New Line, 2004. 172 Figure 16 "Suck on this." ...White Castle. New Line, 2004. 173 Figure 17 "Marijuana Kills." ...White Castle. New Line, 2004. 179 Figure 18 Terrorist Drag. ...Escape from Guantanamo Bay. New Line, 2008. 186 Figure 19 "Extremely accurate." ...White Castle. New Line, 2004. 193 Figure 20 "Dream of the 90s." Portlandia. IFC, 2010. 197 Figure 21 "(M)EAT." Portlandia. IFC, 2012. 201 Figure 22 “Welcome to the Sausage Party.” Portlandia. IFC, 2012 206 vii Abstract Arrested Development explores the seemingly simultaneous extension of adolescence among a growing number of Americans and the rise of neoliberalism in the U.S. through an examination of representations of the slacker in American popular culture. That slackers—in the broadest sense those who avoid work or effort and, in our contemporary understandings, are often associated with “youth” subcultures characterized by apathy, aimlessness, and lack of ambition—refuse the imperatives of the work ethic and normative ambition is significant to this dissertation’s explorations of the relationship between work, gender, sexuality, race, and normative understandings of adulthood. On the one hand, the prevalent representation of the slacker as (until recently) white, male, heterosexual, and middle-class in the vast majority of slacker texts provide us with a means of understanding how privilege informs the slacker’s idleness. In contrast to the laziness of the “welfare queen,” whose over-dependence on the state has (according to neoliberals) resulted in her absolute loss of a work ethic and placed a burden on “hard working Americans,” the slacker seems to be a far more ideal idle subject because his laziness is dependent on the “private” unit of the nuclear family. On the other hand, the slacker provides us with a means of understanding how neoliberalism has impacted and increasingly limited social reproduction for the American middle-class, and how his laziness and lack of ambition reflect a growing sense of dissatisfaction with work among Americans of all social and economic classes. Each of my chapters takes on the subject of normative temporality and its various iterations in, and articulations of, specific narratives and cinematic sub-genres in order to trace a genealogy of the slacker as he has shadowed heteropatriarchal capitalism in the viii wake of neoliberalism. Often characterized as lingering in an extended adolescence, I hope to show by project’s end that the slacker, and his arrested development, mirrors the felt and lived experience of capitalism’s arrested development for an ever-growing majority of people in the United States. Beginning with an analysis of the 1985 film Back to the Future, I examine the ways in which the changes to the economy have resulted in shifts in conceptions of work and masculinity, as well as the increasingly common feeling of uncertainty regarding the future that came to inform slacker identity and anxiety. In Chapter One “No Future: The Reagan Revolution, Back to the Future, and the Politics of Potential,” I discuss the emergence of the slacker in relation to the rise of the Reaganite right in the 1980s, whose promotion of neoliberal economic policies and values shaped the context and representation of the slacker in ways that inform our understandings of the figure in the present. Discussing the emergence of a neoliberal politics of potential during this period, I explore the ways in which neoliberal moral imperatives helped to shape individual understandings and relations to futurity that simultaneously excluded particular subjects from entry into the future as a result of the dismantling of the welfare state, whose demise was enabled by the promotion of the “common sense” imperatives of hard work and personal responsibility. These imperatives enabled the exceptionalization of failure under neoliberal capitalism by placing blame on individual character, often suggesting that failure was voluntary and the product of choice. In its narrative reconstruction of Reaganite nostalgia and futurity, Back to the Future serves as an ideal text for understanding how the widespread disenchantment and loss of confidence in government felt by the American people following the economic stagflation of the 1970s was rerouted and, through Reagan’s own ix articulation of potential as a “becoming” grounded in normative fantasies of the good life, put to the service of neoliberalism. Through its central character, Marty McFly, Back to the Future offers us the slacker as a figure who squanders his potential in the present but who can, through work and effort, actualize that potential and achieve success. In this way, Marty McFly stands as a prototype for the slackers that would emerge in narratives of normative development in the 21st century as witnessed in romantic comedies such as Knocked Up (Chapter 3). In Chapter Two, “Oh Well. Whatever. Nevermind: Generation X and the Ambivalence of Disenchantment,” I discuss the “rise” of Generation X in the United States and the ambivalence of this generation with regard to consumer capitalism and perhaps more importantly to traditional models of aspiration and success as increasing housing prices, loss of job stability and upward mobility, and the stagnation of wages resulted in a disenchantment with the normative forms of life that continued to be promoted by the arbiters of neoliberalism. Using the work of Paolo Virno and Stuart Hall, I read Douglas Coupland’s 1990 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture as an exploration and expression of what Virno calls the “ambivalence of disenchantment.” Disenchantment informs the withdrawal of the characters in the novel from normative middle-class life in their attempts to forge new forms of relation that minimize the effects of consumer capitalism and corporate employment and their normalization of neoliberal forms of socialization in an attempt to create, however unsuccessful and temporary, new understandings of self and relating to others. The normative expectations against which the slacker is defined are constituted not only by the normative world of work but also those normative, middle class values that posit work as a guarantor of upward mobility x and the stability and longevity attributed to heterosexual, nuclear family formations which the characters in the novel reject in favor of friendships not defined by the imperatives of heteronormative capitalism. While the slacker might be viewed as a figure who avoids work or effort in relation to normative expectations regarding employment and established systems of value, Generation X begins to elucidate how their withdrawal is often enabled by privileges associated with the (upper) middle class: values the slackers of the novel ostensibly defy yet from which they also benefit. My third chapter, “’Smells Like Teen Spirit’: Extended Adolescence, Bromance, and Oedipal Acculturation in Knocked Up,” explores the increasing popularity of the slacker man-child as a staple of romantic comedies with an emphasis on the 2007 Judd Apatow movie Knocked Up. This chapter explores the particularities of the man-child’s emergence and character within the economic context of the past several decades as represented in slacker films. The man-child’s extended adolescence is often depicted in these films as a form of liberation—from work, from adulthood, from marriage, from parenthood, and their attendant responsibilities—through the care-free attitude and lifestyle of the slacker, and at times through sonic, linguistic, and other signifiers of blackness that problematically reproduce racialized temporalities of arrested development. This chapter considers the various ways in which the contemporary slacker’s extended adolescence is represented, and how it ultimately reaffirms traditional gender hierarchies and models of adulthood despite the initial, outward appearance of deviation from them. Chapter Four expands the discussion of racialized temporalities of arrested development in my third chapter, by shifting the focus from white, middle class, xi heterosexual males to discuss the racialized slackers playing against model-minority types in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, and its sequel Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. As I argue, this pair of films utilizes the non-white slacker and his drug use in ways that deviate from, and enable a critique of, the standard conventions of the increasingly popular romantic and “bromantic” genres discussed in Chapter Three. This chapter explores the ways in which the temporalities inhabited by the non-white drug recreationalists, aka “stoners,” of these films, provide the means by which they offer trenchant critiques of both genre conventions as well as provide commentary on issues such as the War on Drugs and War on Terror. Finally, my epilogue provides a brief examination of the rise of the New Artisan Economy in the 21st century U.S. as a means of exploring how the economic conditions of the past three decades have resulted in a “return” to forms of masculinity understood through a particular relation to commodity production that involves the producer’s direct involvement in the “making” as a means of reclaiming autonomy and masculine authority. With this in mind, I briefly discuss the potential problems that the rise of an “artisanal masculinity” pose with regard to the adoption of values that could have negative effects on women and people of color due to the particular understandings of masculinity that these forms of labor might produce. 1 Introduction This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence—to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us. —Studs Terkel, Working No one should ever work. Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. —Bob Black, “The Abolition of Work” Refusing the valorizing impulse that so often characterizes American perspectives and discussions of work, the rather dour opening passage from Studs Terkel’s Working with which this introduction begins serves as a sobering reminder of our quotidian relationships to labor. While many Americans often find themselves declaring their love and passion for work, Terkel’s observations seem far more in line with our everyday experiences and feelings. After all, while some of us may have the privilege of “enjoying what we do” or even “loving our jobs,” even in these cases we may find ourselves complaining more often than celebrating, exhausted more often than energized, miserable more often than appreciative. The idea that we should appreciate what we have—that we have a job at all—is, of course, valid in the sense that at any given time in the history of American capitalism, and no more so than during the hard times of economic recession and high unemployment, there are those who cannot find work and are therefore unable to “make a living.” 2 The notion that we “work for a living” reveals the limits of our conceptual frameworks regarding forms of life under capitalism; forms of life that are often understood as contingent upon, if not defined by, our relationships to work. In The Problem with Work, Kathi Weeks notes, “the fact that at present one must work to ‘earn a living’ is taken as part of the natural order rather than as a social convention.” 1 This naturalization of work under capitalism involves the construction of work as both a necessity and inevitability; that is, work is understood as “the only way that most of us can meet our basic needs” such as food, clothing, and shelter. 2 By naturalizing work in this way, it serves as a particularly powerful disciplinary apparatus, whose effectiveness can be traced, in part, to the “common sense” construction of work as economic necessity. If it is, by and large, difficult for many of us to “realistically” conceive of life without work, without the income it provides to minimally, let alone ideally, sustain it, then it also becomes an effective means of exerting power over those who depend on it to survive. As Huey Lewis and the News put it, “I’m taking what they giving ‘cause I’m working for a livin’.” And yet for throughout the 1990s, a species of non-worker emerged as a cultural figure purportedly emblematic of young Americans in the wake of several recessions and Reaganomics: the “slacker.” According to the OED, the earliest definition of the word “slacker” resembling its contemporary usage can be traced to 1898 when it was used to describe “a person who shirks work, or avoids exertion, exercise, etc.” As it turns out, the slacker, the “failed” laborer that is the focus of this project emerged during a time when industrial work discipline was reaching its height. 1 Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2011. 3. 2 Ibid 7. 3 A Genealogy of the Slacker As Tom Lutz reminds us in Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America, “slackers appear... whenever the world of work undergoes serious structural change.” 3 Insofar as the slacker is one who “shirks work, or avoids exertion, exercise,” we might add to Lutz’s formulation that the slacker appears whenever the world undergoes serious structural change and, with that change, witnesses the emergence of new forms of labor discipline. That is, as a figure that resists the disciplinarity imposed by new or changing productive processes, the slacker (and proto- slackers) arises to refuse the imperatives of productivity and the work ethic. Indeed, it is significant that the term emerged at a time that witnessed significant changes in industrial organization and the standardization and rationalization of time, particularly with regard to work. The last decade of the 19th century witnessed “the introduction of time-recording machines for workers... in service since 1890, that stamped an employee’s card with the time he entered and left.” 4 In addition to the introduction of the punch card as a means of determining the distribution of wages, the advent of Taylorism in the last two decades of the 19th century marked a significant “event” in the history of labor discipline. First conceived in 1883 and publicized in 1895, Frederick W. Taylor’s “scientific management” of the workplace represented the culmination of Taylor’s efforts to maximize efficiency in the industrial labor process through the observation of skilled workers and the determination of the exact series of elementary operations that made up their jobs. From there, Taylor “selected the quickest 3 Lutz, Tom. Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 52. 4 Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918. Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 2003. 15. 4 series, timed each elementary operation with a stop-watch to establish minimum ‘unit times,’ and reconstructed jobs with composite times as a standard.... Wages were raised as workers approached their maximum efficiency rate, and those who fell short of a minimum rate were discharged.” 5 As Stephen Kern writes in The Culture of Time and Space, “the introduction of the assembly line at Ford’s Highland Park factory in Detroit in 1913... eliminated challenges and surprises [in the manufacturing process] as the product moved along with every step worked out beforehand” making it “possible to streamline the productive process further by observing every stage, determining the minimum movements necessary to complete all tasks, and then instructing the workers to make them.” 6 The acceleration of production “by increasing the predictability of workers’ movements and depriving workers of the opportunity to select the sequence of actions to complete an operation,” that characterized Taylor’s “scientific management,” witnessed its greatest manifestation in Fordist productive processes. The link between time, work, and productivity is crucial to the development of the “slacker” in its contemporary form, as we typically think of slackers as those who do nothing (are unproductive), masterfully waste time, are irresponsible, and in many cases employed in bad jobs and are not (or choose not to be) particularly good at them. In this sense, the slacker is defined in negative relation to normative expectations of work, defying or undermining a “good” work ethic, which places emphasis on efficiency and productivity, in favor of procrastination. 5 Ibid 115-116. 6 Ibid 92. 5 By “doing nothing,” the slacker is characterized as useless and even parasitic, taking advantage of the hard work of others so that they can sit back, relax, and watch the world pass them by, at least as soon as they get out of bed. The characterization of the slacker as a parasite cannot be extricated from notions of privilege (usually middle-class) which the slacker-as-opportunist uses to his advantage. In his 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, Douglas Coupland helped to usher in the era of the slacker, providing not only a narrative of the lives of Gen X slackers in all their lethargy and angst, but also a vocabulary that exposes the awareness of the very privileges that enable the slacker’s slack. (While it is important to recognize that the terms offered as part of the novel’s marginalia do not directly reflect the thoughts of the characters, as I explain in my second chapter, they do serve as a kind of running commentary on the narrative.) For example, “Safety Net-ism” is defined as “The belief that there will always be a financial and emotional safety net to buffer life’s hurts. Usually parents.” 7 In addition, the slacker defies normative expectations revolving around ambition and success to play or experiment with failure through “occupational slumming,” which is described as “Taking a job well beneath one’s skill or education level as a means of retreat from adult responsibility and/or avoiding possible failure in one’s true occupation.” 8 Whereas the middle-class slacker may avoid adult responsibilities through “occupational slumming,” working class subjects may have to hold down even the worst of jobs out of necessity. As Paul Willis suggests in his examination of working class “lads” in Learning to Labour, “work as a matter of particular job choice... is, in essence, a 7 Coupland, Douglas. Generation X: Tale for an Accelerated Culture. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991. 34. 8 Ibid 113. 6 very middle class construct.” 9 While the characters of Generation X certainly choose to leave their white-collar jobs and pursue downward mobility, they often express very real concerns regarding their ability, regardless of employment, to attain the standards of living of previous generations. Reading the novel in our current era of economic uncertainty and job instability, one cannot help but note the extent to which neoliberal transformations of the labor market have considerably limited job options even for the middle-class. Nevertheless, the marginalia of Generation X and the critical commentary it provides is notable, in no small part because of the ways in which it casts the slacker as an opportunist (a quality that, Paolo Virno notes, arose as a commonplace characteristic of workers in the post-Fordist era), taking advantage of a system that is already working to their benefit, and resembling 19th century discourses regarding the indolence of the bourgeoisie. In his 1880 manifesto The Right To Be Lazy, Paul Lafargue makes a critique of privilege to assault the bourgeoisie while simultaneously challenging both right and left- wing discourses regarding the “Right to Work” that is useful to this project’s consideration of the slacker. While I remain invested in exploring the various ways in which privilege informs representations of the slacker’s laziness, it is equally important to consider the condition of precarity that so many have described as defining the neoliberal present-tense. Additionally, the resurgence in efforts to impose “Right to Work” legislation on the part of Republicans throughout the U.S. suggests that we should, perhaps, be questioning the various ways in which such laws are aimed at reducing workers rights and their ability to make a wide range of demands, in no small 9 Willis, Paul. Learning to Labour: How working class kids get working class jobs. UK: Saxon House, 1977. 7 part due to the goals of right to work proponents to further reduce the power of organized labor. In The Right to Be Lazy, Lafargue decries the “capitalist class” which “has found itself condemned to laziness and forced enjoyment, to unproductiveness and overconsumption,” seeing in them the very parasitic qualities that are often ascribed to the contemporary slacker. 10 Yet it is notable that rather than following in the footsteps of what he terms “traditional” socialists, who demonize privilege in order to elevate the working class to a heroic status by virtue of the valorization of their work ethic, Lafargue laments the delusions of the working class and their demand for the right to work: a strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured our sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny. 11 While the privilege of the “capitalist class” is described as the result of the exploitation and oppression of the proletariat, the problem, as Lafargue sees it, is that many are actually missing the point: rather than valorize hard work, which remains a source of misery, Lafargue articulates a desire to see the working classes seize what the capitalist class possesses, which in this case is not the means of production but rather the Right to Be Lazy. Work under any system is alienating precisely because it goes against what Lafargue describes as the natural human inclination toward idleness, recalling Samuel Johnson’s 1758 observation, “Perhaps man may be more properly called the idle animal; for there is no man who is not sometimes idle,” in his first essay on The Idler. 12 In light 10 Lafargue, Paul. The Right To Be Lazy: And Other Studies. Trans. Charles H. Kerr. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1907. 34. 11 Ibid 9. 12 Quoted in Lutz 69. 8 of this, Lafargue argues that leftist demands for the “Right to Work” reflect “a proletariat corrupted by capitalist ethics.” 13 It is perhaps somewhat ironic that Lafargue’s writing so closely resembles that of Oscar Wilde. The dandy, himself often understood as a bourgeois subject (including in much of Wilde’s work) who has “found itself condemned to laziness and forced enjoyment, to unproductiveness and overconsumption,” emerges in Wilde’s work as both a reflection of this characterization as well as a figure whose only desire is to see the world become precisely what Lafargue envisions. There is no doubt that the dandy as a literary figure is implicated in the problematics of bourgeois subjecthood, and yet Wilde- as-dandy advocates for an anti-utilitarian, anti-work aesthetics in much of his prose, ranging from The Picture of Dorian Gray to “The Critic As Artist” (whose first part is titled “With some remarks on the importance of doing nothing”) and “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” Working against the dominant terms of capitalist production and utility, Wilde declares in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray that “All art is quite useless,” before entering into his narrative of the dandiacal Gray whose own uselessness (he is at one point described as someone who “doesn’t do anything”) results in his early equation with the uselessness of art. 14 If capitalism is dependent upon work and the usefulness of both the laborer and the commodity, then Wilde’s articulation of an aesthetics that emphasizes uselessness stands in direct opposition to the utilitarianism of industrial capitalism. The idle conversations between not only the characters of Dorian Gray but also the interlocutors of Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist,” who debate the 13 Lafargue 56. 14 Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. From The Works of Oscar Wilde. Ed. G. F. Maine. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co, 1954. 17. See also, “The Critic as Artist” (948-998) and “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1018-1043) in The Works of Oscar Wilde, 1954. 9 “importance of doing nothing,” reflect not only the importance of idleness to the contemplative life, inherited from the Romantics (another group of proto-slacker figures), but in many ways resemble the seemingly useless conversations regularly engaged in by the contemporary slacker. The dandy is a particularly important genealogical node for understanding the contemporary slacker insofar as he is an idle figure informed both by his relationship to work as well as his failure to conform to bourgeois and imperial codes of “proper” masculine, heterosexual conduct. Exemplified by Oscar Wilde, the “dandification” of the man of letters—of the aesthete—was characteristic of a period during which “Aesthetics were being crushed by athletics, as young men put their energies into training for the empire, rather than posing” or lying in idle repose. In Effeminate England, Joseph Bristow writes, “the homoerotic inflection to much of [Wilde’s] mature work is defined against—rather than flatly opposed to—a world governed by the kind of entrepreneurial and utilitarian form of manliness that was regarded as respectable.” 15 The British imperial project of the 19th and 20th centuries, which witnessed the emergence of the “sporty” and militaristic masculinities against which the effeminate man was defined during Wilde’s time and ascribed to the dandy (additionally complicated by Wilde’s Irishness— a comparison made in Thomas Carlyle’s “The Dandiacal Body” in Sartor Resartus), take on additional significance when considered alongside the use of the term “slacker” in the first half of the 20th century to describe draft-dodgers and deserters. As this project argues, the slacker remains a crucial index of masculinity after the mid-twentieth century, and becomes the defining framework for white, American 15 Bristow, Joseph. Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing After 1885. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. 19. 10 masculinity in the U.S. after a man’s “duty” was configured primarily through categories of work in the post-World-War-II era. More specifically, this project on Arrested Development, traces how the ideologies and transformative definitions of work that have come to be bracketed under the category of “neoliberalism” in the latter decades of the twentieth-century into the twenty-first have not only made possible, but made necessary a version of the slacker to sustain its ideological fantasies about work, the work ethic and— in its latter formulations—the very notion of creativity or “creative labor” itself. The Rise of Neoliberalism, the Death of the “Work Ethic,” and the Emergence of the Slacker in Popular Culture This project, Arrested Development, explores the seemingly simultaneous extension of adolescence among a growing number of Americans and the rise of neoliberalism in the U.S. through an examination of representations of the slacker in American popular culture. That slackers—in the broadest sense those who avoid work or effort and, in our contemporary understandings, are often associated with “youth” subcultures characterized by apathy, aimlessness, and lack of ambition—refuse the imperatives of the work ethic and normative ambition is significant to this dissertation’s explorations of the relationship between work, gender, sexuality, race, and normative understandings of adulthood. On the one hand, the prevalent representation of the slacker as (until recently) white, male, heterosexual, and middle-class in the vast majority of slacker texts provide us with a means of understanding how privilege informs the slacker’s idleness. In contrast to the laziness of the “welfare queen,” whose over- dependence on the state has (according to neoliberals) resulted in her absolute loss of a work ethic and placed a burden on “hard working Americans,” the slacker seems to be a far more ideal idle subject because his laziness is dependent on the “private” unit of the 11 nuclear family. On the other hand, the slacker provides us with a means of understanding how neoliberalism has impacted and increasingly limited social reproduction for the American middle-class, and how his laziness and lack of ambition reflect a growing sense of dissatisfaction with work among Americans of all social and economic classes. While (to echo Huey Lewis once more) we have long “taken what we’re given” because many of us must “work for a living,” neoliberal capitalism has in many instances deployed this logic as a means of achieving its specific goals. David Harvey explains that “Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.” 16 To achieve these ends, neoliberal policies “curb the power of labour, deregulate industry, agriculture, and resource extraction, and liberate the powers of finance both internally and on the world stage.” 17 Despite the denials of neoliberal economists, politicians, and pundits, one of the central aims of neoliberalism has been the restoration of class power and the upward redistribution of wealth. With regard to work, neoliberal economic transformations resulted in the drastic reduction of the power of organized labor through the Transfer of industrial activity from the unionized north-east and midwest to the non-unionized and ‘right-to-work’ states of the south, if not beyond to Mexico and South-East Asia... (subsidized by favourable taxation for new investment and aided by the shift in emphasis from production to finance as the centrepiece of capitalist class power). Deindustrialization of formerly unionized core industrial regions (the so-called ‘rust belt’) disempowered labour. Corporations could threaten plant closures, and risk—and usually win—strikes when necessary. 18 16 Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism: Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 2. 17 Ibid 1. 18 Ibid 53. 12 All of these factors contributed to the ever-increasing “threat of unemployment in a post- Keynesian economy.” 19 While the stagnation of wages in the U.S. during the first half of the 1970s was certainly a product of stagflation, the decline in real wage levels over the past forty years can be understood, in part, through the deeply embedded belief in the absolute economic necessity of work. In Labor’s Time, Jonathan Cutler writes that the economic recessions of the 1980s and early 1990s as well as the rise of automated labor resulted in an increasing sense of job insecurity in the U.S. Much as earlier definitions of the slacker emerged alongside the rise of Fordist “efficiencies” in labor practice, the slacker we have come to know through popular culture in the 1980s and 1990s was also cultivated by this combined rise in industrial “efficiency” through automated labor, and the precarity of labor to which such technical transformations give rise. “Even as late as mid-February 1999, as unemployment dropped to thirty-year lows,” Cutler writes, the perception of job insecurity resulted in workers’ willingness to regularly forego wage increases in favor of labor contracts that ensured job security. 20 Thus, the stagflation of the 1970s, the economic recessions of the early and late 1980s, the “[George Herbert Walker] Bush Recession” of 1990-1993, the bursting dot-com bubble of 1999, and the “Great Recession” of 2008 and subsequent jobless recovery have not, in many cases, resulted in demands for radical change, but served to reinforce many Americans’ fundamental belief in the necessity of work as “the only legitimate means of access to even a minimal standard of living.” 21 19 Cutler, Jonathan. Labor's Time: Shorter Hours, the UAW, and the Struggle for American Unionism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004. 181. 20 Ibid 182. 21 Weeks 146. 13 The seemingly incontrovertible logics of work-as-economic-necessity are reinforced by our understanding of it as an “individual moral practice and collective ethical obligation.” 22 Insofar as “the neoliberal revolution usually attributed to Thatcher and Reagan after 1979 had to be accomplished by democratic means... the construction of political consent” via “cultural and traditional values” was necessary for its successful implementation. 23 One crucial component with regard to the neoliberal construction of consent through cultural values is the work ethic. As Lisa Duggan argues in The Twilight of Equality?, “efforts to create a world safe for neoliberalism have been most successful where the domains of Western liberalism have been successfully imposed or redescribed through neoliberalism’s key terms: privatization and personal responsibility.” 24 The work ethic plays a significant role in these efforts as a crucial means of understanding, expressing, and performing personal responsibility as well as identifying irresponsible and dependent “bad subjects” who supposedly make evident the necessity for neoliberal privatization. The promotion of privatization through the valorization of personal responsibility vis-à-vis the work ethic has proven to be a highly effective means of obscuring systemic inequalities by identifying failure as the product of individual moral deficiency and success as the inevitable outcome of ambition and hard work. This deployment of the work ethic was pivotal to the dismantling of the welfare state as the dependence of welfare recipients on public services (and therefore the tax dollars of “hard working Americans”) was cited as evidence of the state’s role in reproducing irresponsible, even parasitic behavior. The demonization and pathologization 22 Ibid 11. 23 Harvey 39. 24 Duggan, Lisa. The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. 12. 14 of so-called “welfare queens” through racially coded stereotypes of idleness was commonplace in anti-welfare discourse, which insisted that welfare fostered dependence on the state and in turn promoted laziness in its recipients and their children. The social reproduction of idleness allegedly promoted by the welfare state thus signaled a failure to internalize the work ethic as welfare eliminated the necessity for work as a source of income, despite the fact that “workfare” (as well as welfare) barely provides, if it does so at all, a living wage. The workfare component of welfare reform as seen in the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which in the words of President Bill Clinton put an “end to welfare as we know it,” exposes the underlying agenda of neoliberalism to “boost corporate profits” by mandating low-wage work; workfare became an important means of expanding the low-wage labor market through conscription. 25 Indeed, even Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose 1965 report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action serves as a key text informing neoliberal anti- welfare discourse, called the 1996 act “the most brutal act of social policy since Reconstruction. Those involved will take this disgrace to their graves.” 26 Neoliberal anti-welfare discourse borrows not only from the Moynihan Report but a longer history of racist, classist, and misogynist discourses in the U.S. which have cast economically, politically, socially, and culturally marginalized subjects as existing in a state of arrested development. This arrested development, as anti-welfare rhetoric makes abundantly clear, has often gone hand-in-hand with characterizations of these marginalized groups as pathologically lazy. Yet since the 1960s, the notion of arrested 25 Lawrence Meade writes, "Low-wage work apparently must be mandated, just as a draft has sometimes been necessary to staff the military." Meade, Lawrence. Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship. New York: Free Press, 1986. 84. Quoted in Duggan, 15. 26 Quoted in Lutz 10. 15 development with regard to the extension of adolescence and the delay of adulthood among capitalism’s putatively privileged subjects has gained increasing popularity in the U.S. In the 1986 book The Postponed Generation: Why American Youth Are Growing Up Later, Susan Littwin observed, with a notable degree of concern, the extension of adolescence by a decade as young people took longer to assume adult responsibilities than preceding generations. 27 In 1990, TIME Magazine published an issue on “twentysomethings,” reporting that “the latest crop of adults wants to postpone growing up.” 28 And in the 21st century, a number of texts, such as developmental psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett’s work on “emerging adulthood,” Richard Settersten and Barbara E. Ray’s book Not Quite Adults, and Robin Marantz’s “What Is It About 20- Somethings?” for The New York Times Magazine, have all posed similar questions regarding the extension of adolescence in the U.S. While earlier inquiries into the postponement of adulthood have all made mention of work as a crucial “rite of passage” marking one’s entry into adulthood, these more recent texts not only discuss the importance of work to normative understandings of development but also contextualize this arrested development within the social, economic, and cultural changes that have occurred within the past several decades. The increasing sense that the standard of living of previous generations is no longer available to middle-class Generation Xers and their predecessors, expressed in both the popular press and fiction of the 1990s into the contemporary moment, suggests 27 Littwin, Susan. The Postponed Generation: Why American Youth Are Growing Up Later. New York: HarperCollins, 1987. 28 Gross, David M., and Sophfronia Scott. “Living: Proceeding with Caution.” TIME. 16 July 1990. <http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,970634,00.html>. 16 that the arrested development of the slacker (who in most cases has a job, just not a good job) is indicative of the arrested development of neoliberal capitalism itself. Throughout this project, I make regular references to popular press coverage while focusing on close readings of literature and film about slackers, with a particular emphasis on film, in no small part because film has been the most popular medium through which the slacker is represented. By choosing to analyze popular film, I am not interested in providing an exhaustive survey of the slacker’s appearance in cinematic history; rather, I read film throughout this dissertation in order to both “tap-in” to the mood of an era and to explore the ways in which narratives in slacker films both deviate from and reinforce those popular narratives that inform broader cultural frameworks for normativity itself; the always already idealized and limited fantasies that so many aspire to “make real” but are always just beyond reach. Not coincidentally, the slacker is centralized in, and centralizes multiple sub-genres of cinematic comedy from slapstick and absurdist forms, to the romantic comedy itself: the very genre that provides a blueprint for normative sexual, gendered and economic relations in the contemporary U.S. It should come as little surprise that slackers became an increasingly common fixture in American popular culture amidst the economic transformations spearheaded by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s that we now call neoliberalism. The neoliberal economic order and its promotion of privatization and personal responsibility—a personal responsibility expressed through and measured by, in no small part, hard work—emerged in the U.S. from the stagflation of the 1970s and resulted in significant transformations to the world of work. Deindustrialization led to mass lay-offs in the manufacturing sector and gave way to the rapid growth of the 17 service economy. Corporate restructuring in the name of eliminating “redundancy” resulted in plant closures and mass layoffs (for the sake of maximizing profits more so than increasing efficiency) and gave rise to no-benefits, part-time and contingent jobs which have increasingly become the norm. Adaptability, flexibility, and mobility are now the ideal characteristics of a new workforce as economic precarity and job instability have become two of the defining features of our time. During the 1990s, college admissions rates increased to record highs as American youth came to the increasingly common realization that “good jobs” could not be found without college degrees, only to result in high unemployment rates in the professional sector as college graduates discovered that there weren’t enough jobs for the kinds of work for which they were educated, finding themselves increasingly reliant upon “no future” employment in the retail and service industries. In the midst of the recent “Great Recession,” tremendous media attention focused on the record numbers of college graduates moving back home to live with their parents, who found it increasingly difficult to shoulder the responsibility for caring for their adult children as mounting debt and dwindling savings, amongst other factors, contributed to the crisis of the American middle class. And we have by now become all too familiar with the so-called “discouraged worker effect,” a term used to characterize those who “fear” returning to or have given up on looking for work during extended periods of unemployment. Alongside these transformations and conditions, the contemporary slacker started to emerge in the 1980s, which I explore in greater depth in the first chapter, and by the 1990s had become something of a mass-media event. From the stoner-surfer Jeff Spicoli of Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) to Marty McFly of Back to the Future (1985) 18 and Ferris Bueller and Cameron Frye of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), 1980s popular cinema offered audiences a new type of cinematic (anti)hero that seems not only strikingly antithetical to the oft-valorized work ethic but also to the militaristic macho figures that blasted their way through war-zones and drug-dens and into theaters during that same decade. Action movie stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone presented images of macho masculinity with their erotically gleaming muscles and excessive gun play, which, as Chris Lee notes, instills a particular sense of confidence via the cinematic representation of the political philosophy “might equals right” during times of economic and global instability. 29 Although action heroes may help the movie-going public to cope with anxieties they cannot possibly deal with (fighting drug king-pins, terrorists, Soviets), often in relation to foreign policy, domestic “law and order” initiatives, and transnational conflicts such as the “war on drugs,” the slacker narratives of the 1980s, largely contained within the “teen film” genre, gave voice not only to local or domestic anxieties regarding the pressures of success and fears of failure but also portrayed forms and fantasies of youthful rebellion against the restrictions placed upon their lives by adults (parents, principals, teachers) and institutions (oftentimes schools). While the movies of the 1980s provide us with a few examples of slackers at the tail end of their unruly adolescence, it wasn’t until the early 1990s that they became an increasingly common mainstay in American popular and independent film and a topic of fascination for the news media. In 1990, TIME magazine’s issue on the “twentysomething” generation, asked whether they were “Laid back, late blooming or just lost?” expressing, in part, a concern regarding the perceived deterioration of ambition 29 Lee, Chris. “Invasion of the Bodybuilders.” The Daily Beast. June 6, 2011. <http://www.thedailybeast .com/articles/2011/06/06/macho-men-are-back-in-u-s-movie-theaters.html>. 19 and the work ethic amongst a generation entering adulthood, and presumably the workforce, at the turn of the decade. The publication of Coupland’s Generation X and the theatrical release of Richard Linklater’s film Slacker in 1991, popularized both the label Generation X and the term “slacker,” and are often credited with the increasing popularity and production of movies about slackers. By the mid-nineties onward, slacker cinema became a genre unto itself with movies ranging from Kevin Smith’s Clerks (1994) and Ben Stiller’s Reality Bites (1994) to Mike Judge’s Office Space (1999). All of these texts gave expression to and reflected an increasingly widespread sense of dissatisfaction with work under corporate capitalism and the service sector economy. Shifting their focus away from teenage truancy, tardiness, and disinterest in institutionalized education as the slacker’s defining characteristics and toward the boredom, disillusionment, and misery of workers in the corporate and service sectors, these texts often vocalize a broader sense of disenchantment with work through their characters’ complaints and enraged tirades against the drudgery and indignity of their jobs (and in some cases work in general) as well as their commitment to on-the-job laziness and inefficiency. As Clerks and Office Space in particular suggest, the minimization of effort put into work is no more rewarding than striving to excel in the workplace as a model employee in an era of stagnant wages, dead-end jobs, and rampant corporate downsizing. Popular representations of the slacker reveal the proliferation of meaning and even identities to which the term has become attached. The slacker is a college drop-out whose primary interest is in creative endeavors such as playing in a band. He holds down a job only out of necessity and depends on friends to provide a couch to sleep on during 20 frequent periods of unemployment (Reality Bites). He is a college-drop out who finds employment in a convenience store and complains about the stagnation and misery of his thankless job while putting little, if any, effort into leaving that job behind for the opportunities that are available but require too much hard work to achieve (Clerks). He may work in an office as a pencil-pusher, inserting meaningless data into spreadsheets when he isn’t wasting time watching the clock or playing solitaire on his computer, in a constant state of annoyance, anxiety, and preparedness for the moment when his manager’s head will suddenly pop up over the walls of his cubicle (Office Space). Or he may not be employed at all, spending a few hours a day designing a derivative, soft- pornographic website, while his partner in accidental reproductive heterosexuality laments her misfortune for sleeping with a dead-end loser, nevertheless giving him a chance because he seems to be learning to “work” at their relationship (Knocked Up). He may literally be a man-child who lives with his parents into his forties, depending on their upper-middle class incomes to provide for him and to allow him to remain gainfully and comfortably unemployed (Step Brothers). Though there are exceptions (and many other examples), the slacker is almost always white, heterosexual, male, and middle class (or at the very least, benefits from the safety net provided by his middle class parents), though he also often foregoes the pursuit of a middle class life in favor of downward mobility. At his core—and the slacker is most often a he—the slacker is defined by a particular proclivity to “avoid work or effort.” This avoidance of work or effort cannot be simply understood as the avoidance of work altogether, although some iterations of the slacker certainly wallow in the “freedoms” that come with unemployment. In many cases, the slacker’s avoidance of 21 effort at work, his disavowal of and resistance to the work ethic, is what defines the slacker as such. It would be all too easy to simply dismiss such forms of resistance; after all, when the slacker avoids work or effort, someone else must often “pick up the slack.” Yet we must also recall the crucial role that the work ethic plays as a disciplinary apparatus that produces normative subjects, not only in terms of the normative ideal of the “good worker” but also with regard to normative gender identities that are often understood through work as well as the heteronormative forms of life that are often contingent upon it as a source of income that ensures heterofamilial longevity. The normative expectations against which the slacker is defined are constituted not only by the normative world of work but also those normative, middle class values that posit work as a guarantor of upward mobility and the stability and longevity attributed to heterosexual, nuclear family formations. Popular writers such as Ann Powers and Marissa Meltzer have argued that slacking isn’t necessarily about underachievement, but rather a “different standard of achievement.” Yet these different standards of achievement do not deviate from normative capitalism and in fact have been appropriated by it. The rise of the creative class (Richard Florida) and “no-collar work” (Andrew Ross) during this period were the result of ever increasing complaints made by employees in a variety of sectors, and job dissatisfaction in the corporate world in particular led to the “industrialization of bohemia” as work adapted to the demands of a segment of the American population that had become disenchanted with ideas of full- time employment in a corporate America that they viewed as thankless and unsatisfying. 22 The Chapters Throughout Arrested Development, queer theory offers an important critical framework for understanding the normative imperatives that give rise to, and ultimately transform the slacker, who is a figure on the fringe of normalcy, if not quite queer himself. As I mention above, and as I discuss in detail throughout this project, the slacker inhabits a certain deviation from normalcy without quite leaving the privileges his white, middle-class heterosexuality often affords. In fact, in many instances, the slacker actually can afford to slack, and is therefore capable of existing as a comedic figure: as another object of amusement, instead of as a demonized, gendered, racialized specter like the so- called “welfare queen,” neoliberalism’s true villain. While this dissertation can only begin to sketch some of the contrasts between these two economic and social types in the wake of neoliberalism’s reconfiguration of work, I hope to show how queer theory serves as a bridge for subjects who—to borrow Kathi Weeks’ words, as they conjure a key queer of color critical concept that belongs to José Esteban Muñoz—“disidentify with the work ethic,” further elucidating the importance of thinking about the slacker as part of an effort to think through and challenge the disciplinary regimes of heteropatriarchal capitalism. 30 To these ends, each of my chapters will take on the subject of normative temporality and its various iterations in, and articulations of, specific narratives and cinematic sub-genres in order to trace a genealogy of the slacker as he has shadowed heteropatriarchal capitalism in the wake of neoliberalism. Often characterized as lingering in an extended adolescence, I hope to show by project’s end that the slacker, and his arrested development, mirrors the felt and lived experience of capitalism’s arrested development for an ever-growing majority of people in the United States. 30 Weeks 80. 23 Beginning with an analysis of the 1985 film Back to the Future, I examine the ways in which the changes to the economy have resulted in shifts in conceptions of work and masculinity, as well as the increasingly common feeling of uncertainty regarding the future that came to inform slacker identity and anxiety. In Chapter One “No Future: The Reagan Revolution, Back to the Future, and the Politics of Potential,” I discuss the emergence of the slacker in relation to the rise of the Reaganite right in the 1980s, whose promotion of neoliberal economic policies and values shaped the context and representation of the slacker in ways that inform our understandings of the figure in the present. Discussing the emergence of a neoliberal politics of potential during this period, I explore the ways in which neoliberal moral imperatives helped to shape individual understandings and relations to futurity that simultaneously excluded particular subjects from entry into the future as a result of the dismantling of the welfare state, whose demise was enabled by the promotion of the “common sense” imperatives of hard work and personal responsibility. These imperatives enabled the exceptionalization of failure under neoliberal capitalism by placing blame on individual character, often suggesting that failure was voluntary and the product of choice. In its narrative reconstruction of Reaganite nostalgia and futurity, Back to the Future serves as an ideal text for understanding how the widespread disenchantment and loss of confidence in government felt by the American people following the economic stagflation of the 1970s was rerouted and, through Reagan’s own articulation of potential as a “becoming” grounded in normative fantasies of the good life, put to the service of neoliberalism. Through its central character, Marty McFly, Back to the Future offers us the slacker as a figure who squanders his potential in the present but 24 who can, through work and effort, actualize that potential and achieve success. In this way, Marty McFly stands as a prototype for the slackers that would emerge in narratives of normative development in the 21st century as witnessed in romantic comedies such as Knocked Up (Chapter 3). In Chapter Two, “Oh Well. Whatever. Nevermind: Generation X and the Ambivalence of Disenchantment,” I discuss the “rise” of Generation X in the United States and the ambivalence of this generation with regard to consumer capitalism and perhaps more importantly to traditional models of aspiration and success as increasing housing prices, loss of job stability and upward mobility, and the stagnation of wages resulted in a disenchantment with the normative forms of life that continued to be promoted by the arbiters of neoliberalism. Using the work of Paolo Virno and Stuart Hall, I read Douglas Coupland’s 1990 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture as an exploration and expression of what Virno calls the “ambivalence of disenchantment.” Disenchantment informs the withdrawal of the characters in the novel from normative middle-class life in their attempts to forge new forms of relation that minimize the effects of consumer capitalism and corporate employment and their normalization of neoliberal forms of socialization in an attempt to create, however unsuccessful and temporary, new understandings of self and relating to others. The normative expectations against which the slacker is defined are constituted not only by the normative world of work but also those normative, middle class values that posit work as a guarantor of upward mobility and the stability and longevity attributed to heterosexual, nuclear family formations which the characters in the novel reject in favor of friendships not defined by the imperatives of heteronormative capitalism. While the slacker might be viewed as a figure 25 who avoids work or effort in relation to normative expectations regarding employment and established systems of value, Generation X begins to elucidate how their withdrawal is often enabled by privileges associated with the (upper) middle class: values the slackers of the novel ostensibly defy yet from which they also benefit. My third chapter, “’Smells Like Teen Spirit’: Extended Adolescence, Bromance, and Oedipal Acculturation in Knocked Up,” explores the increasing popularity of the slacker man-child as a staple of romantic comedies with an emphasis on the 2007 Judd Apatow movie Knocked Up. This chapter explores the particularities of the man-child’s emergence and character within the economic context of the past several decades as represented in slacker films. The man-child’s extended adolescence is often depicted in these films as a form of liberation—from work, from adulthood, from marriage, from parenthood, and their attendant responsibilities—through the care-free attitude and lifestyle of the slacker, and at times through sonic, linguistic, and other signifiers of blackness that problematically reproduce racialized temporalities of arrested development. This chapter considers the various ways in which the contemporary slacker’s extended adolescence is represented, and how it ultimately reaffirms traditional gender hierarchies and models of adulthood despite the initial, outward appearance of deviation from them. Chapter Four expands the discussion of racialized temporalities of arrested development in my third chapter, by shifting the focus from white, middle class, heterosexual males to discuss the racialized slackers playing against model-minority types in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, and its sequel Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. As I argue, this pair of films utilizes the non-white slacker and 26 his drug use in ways that deviate from, and enable a critique of, the standard conventions of the increasingly popular romantic and “bromantic” genres discussed in Chapter Three. This chapter explores the ways in which the temporalities inhabited by the non-white drug recreationalists, aka “stoners,” of these films, provide the means by which they offer trenchant critiques of both genre conventions as well as provide commentary on issues such as the War on Drugs and War on Terror. Finally, my epilogue provides a brief examination of the rise of the New Artisan Economy in the 21st century U.S. as a means of exploring how the economic conditions of the past three decades have resulted in a “return” to forms of masculinity understood through a particular relation to commodity production that involves the producer’s direct involvement in the “making” as a means of reclaiming autonomy and masculine authority. With this in mind, I briefly discuss the potential problems that the rise of an “artisanal masculinity” pose with regard to the adoption of values that could have negative effects on women and people of color due to the particular understandings of masculinity that these forms of labor might produce. This project was originally conceived as part of an ongoing effort to understand and imagine an anti-work politics and its potential for reconceptualizing sociality, while transforming ways of knowing and being in the world. As my research progressed, I became increasingly aware of the necessity for interrogating the forms of privilege that accrued to certain subjects based on race, class, gender, and sexuality in ways that inform and enable the kinds of laziness that might be conceived as imbued with the potential to liberate us from work, and the structures of power that this laziness could reinforce. The figure of the slacker, often limited as he is by the logics of capital and heteronormativity, 27 and perhaps precisely because he gives the appearance of normativity’s disruption, is a necessary subject to investigate and understand if we are genuinely to challenge the primacy and even the necessity of work, and if we are to imagine—perhaps even make real—a world where we might all enjoy an idleness for which no one has to pick up the slack. 28 Chapter One No Future: The Reagan Revolution, Back to the Future, and the Politics of Potential And tonight I want to speak directly to America’s younger generation, because you hold the destiny of our nation in your hands. With all the temptations young people face, it sometimes seems the allure of the permissive society requires superhuman feats of self-control. But the call of the future is too strong, the challenge too great to get lost in the blind alleyways of dissolution, drugs, and despair. Never has there been a more exciting time to be alive, a time of rousing wonder and heroic achievement. As they said in the film Back to the Future, “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.” —Ronald Reagan, 1986 State of the Union Address When Reagan was not telling jokes or stories, he was resting. Washington was, and remains, a city of compulsive twelve-hour days and workaholics who measure themselves by how many hours they put in. The president, with the most powerful and demanding job in the city, worked relatively short days from nine to four. Carter was known as a man who took briefing books home and studied them late into the night upstairs in the residence. Reagan had no such schedule. —J. David Woodard, The America That Reagan Built “It’s morning again in America,” declared the popular political advertisement for Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign. “Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?” Filled with uplifting images of Americans rising in the morning to go to work, of a couple getting married as their proud parents look on teary-eyed and smiling, and children gazing, awe-struck, at the American flag, the ad encapsulates the optimism and hope that characterized Reagan’s vision for America’s future, contrasting it with the stagflation of the late 1970s and early 80s as a means not only of indicating the alleged economic “progress” that had been achieved during his first term but also the potentially negative consequences of a return to a Democratically controlled White House. As Reagan noted, “The choices this year are not just between two different personalities or between two political parties. They’re between 29 two different visions of the future.” 31 These visions of the future played a crucial role in the 1984 presidential contest between Reagan and Walter Mondale, wherein Reagan’s optimism and hope were pitted against what he saw as the pessimism and fear of his Democratic opponent. During his remarks at a rally in Atlanta, Georgia following the Democratic National Convention, Reagan told his audience: “The future, according to [the Democrats], is dark and getting darker, and Americans are very unhappy. According to the other party, there’s nothing to hope for but despair, and we have nothing in store but fear itself.” 32 “Prouder, Stronger, Better,” the official title of the ad more popularly known as “Morning in America,” is, despite its brevity, an exemplary text for understanding not only Reaganite perspectives on family and the economy, but also the neoliberal capitalist “common sense” which inextricably links the stability of normative family life to a stable economy. Personalizing economic recovery through its depictions of American workers and families, “Morning in America” directly links economic prosperity—increased employment, reduced interest rates and inflation—to familial prosperity: “This afternoon 6,500 young men and women will be married, and with inflation at less than half of what it was just four years ago, they can look forward with confidence to the future.” Separated by a brief shot of the U.S. Capitol building, the marriage scene is followed by one of children looking upward with patriotic wonder at an American flag rippling in the morning breeze. This juxtaposition does not merely associate marriage 31 Reagan, Ronald. “Remarks Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas.” 23 Aug. 1984. <http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/ 1984/82384f.htm>. I was first made aware of these remarks in Anthony Corrado’s “Back to the Future.” American Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 2 (June 1988): 273-280. 32 Reagan, Ronald. “Remarks at the Reagan-Bush Rally in Atlanta, Georgia.” 26 July 1984. <http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1984/72684a.htm>. 30 with heterosexual reproduction, but links the family and more importantly the Child to the Reaganite understanding of national prosperity in the present and vision for the nation’s future. The image of patriotic children reflects “a strong and enduring belief that the best of U.S. national subjectivity can be read in its childlike manifestations and in a polity that organizes its public sphere around a commitment to making a world that could sustain an idealized infantile citizen.” 33 The final shots of the ad feature adult men hoisting the stars and stripes, ending finally with a close-up of a waving flag, turning all viewers into the awe-struck children of Reagan’s America. Lauren Berlant explains that “citizen adults have learned to ‘forget’ or to render as impractical, naive, or childish their utopian political identifications in order to be politically happy and economically functional.” 34 But at a time when the stagflation of the 1970s and the economic recession of the early 1980s continued to inform the conditions of people’s lives, a little utopianism couldn’t hurt. What the “Morning in America” ad enables with its parting shot, wherein we all become children gazing at the flag, is a kind of naive hope in the utopian that renders all of us, however briefly, infantile citizens; filled with hope in the potential for a better tomorrow under the leadership of President Reagan. Reagan encouraged and exploited the belief in the need to restore the United States to its former glory, capitalizing on the disenchantment, rage, and despair of an American public who felt that they had been failed or marginalized by the liberal economic and social policies of the 1960s and early 70s that had, they felt, plunged the nation into ruin. Emerging from the stagflation of the 1970s and early 80s, the “America that Reagan built” witnessed radical shifts in the economy, politics, and culture via 33 Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1997. 28. 34 Ibid 29. 31 neoliberalization. If the liberalizing impulse of the “permissive society” fostered dependence on the state, resulting in laziness and irresponsibility, then the restoration of traditional American values such as hard work and personal responsibility were the antidote for a stagnant economy and a nation in decline. Rather than a return to the stagnant past of the 1970s—why, after all, “Morning in America” asks us, “would we want to return to where we were just four short years ago?”—Reagan proposed a return to a more productive and prosperous past as a means of forging a brighter future. Reagan’s framing of optimistic futurity vis-a-vis America’s youth against the “allure of the permissive society” in the opening epigraph to this chapter, which rendered the present as a time of “dissolution, drugs, and despair,” reveals the temporal dynamics of the Reaganite right’s nostalgic utopianism. In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, Berlant writes, “To effect [the] restoration of the imagined nation, the American ex-icon denigrates the political present tense and incites nostalgia for the national world of its iconicity, setting up that lost world as a utopian horizon of political aspiration.” 35 Reagan’s identification of the permissive society— often associated with the political, cultural, and social upheavals of the 1960s and 70s— as the cause of the morally and economically degraded present establishes the period preceding it as the lost world to which the nation needed to return in order to lift itself out of the moribund present and proceed forward into a wondrous future. This idealized past provided the necessary strength and optimism to overcome the so-called negative effects of the permissive turn, and allowed Reagan and his supporters to re-imagine the present as an “exciting time to be alive, a time of rousing wonder and heroic achievement,” a time brimming with potential. 35 Berlant 2. 32 In a speech replete with the language of futurity, Reagan’s reference to the 1985 blockbuster Back to the Future (dir. Robert Zemeckis), about a slacker who travels through time to 1955 and unwittingly improves the present-as-future by orchestrating an idealized, Hollywood romance between his teenaged parents, should not be dismissed merely as an instance of political pandering to a generation of young movie-goers. As I hope to show, the various time travels that take place in Back to the Future are reflective of the politicized wish-fulfillment fantasies of the Reaganite right that were so crucial to its vision of a renewed and restored America. Enacting the temporality of national restoration against the backdrop of economic recession and familial crisis, Back to the Future and its sequels provide us with the specific articulation of potential that served as the foundation for a distinctly neoliberal form of political optimism that emerged during the Reagan era and played a crucial role in the establishment of the neoliberal order. In the absence of functioning time machines, Reaganite nostalgia provided the means by which the unfulfilled potential of the 1950s could be fully realized in the present. Simon Reynolds notes in Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past that nostalgia for the past is “a response to the build-up of ideas and styles whose potentials have not been fully extracted.” 36 Back to the Future literalizes the Reaganite temporality of national restoration through its representation of a present marked by economic decline and familial crisis, and its protagonist’s journey into a nostalgic past serves as the means by which the extraction and actualization of its potential results in the creation of an optimistic present. This is not only accomplished through the parallels drawn between the nostalgic past and the “future” that is Marty McFly’s 1985 present, 36 Reynolds, Simon. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. New York: Faber & Faber, Inc., 2011. 197. 33 but more importantly, through the articulation of the present as having the potential to become “whatever you make it.” In fact, the 1985 present is the timeline that faces constant revisions and interruptions: from the first film’s opening look into a stagnant, loveless, and boring 1985 to its final reveal of a hopeful, upwardly mobile 1985 produced by Marty’s intervention into his parents’ teen romance; to the lawlessness and disorder of a dystopian 1985 in the film’s sequel; and finally, to the 1985 at the trilogy’s conclusion, which expresses the Reaganite Right’s reinvigoration of the American Dream as Marty’s best friend and companion throughout the series, Doc Brown, tells Marty and his future wife, “Your future is whatever you make it: so make it a good one.” Rather than simply marking the return of the time traveler to his “correct” time, these movements back and forth through time literalize the temporality of national and familial restoration, as Marty travels to the nostalgic past of the 1950s to “correct” the present-in-crisis and make possible a hopeful future. If nostalgia informed the conservative utopian imaginary of national restoration in the 1980s, then the imagined morals, values, and way of life of the 1950s provides us with a means of understanding the particularities of the Reaganite articulation of potential. Potential here is regulated and defined through the imagined and idealized past; it is about who someone will become via the adherence to traditional values and the restoration of a way of life believed to be lost to the present and whose loss informs the present’s corruption and degradation. The actualization of this potential demands particular forms of investment that are both capitalist and heteronormative, dictating the terms of self-realization as a successful citizen-subject and limiting access to it based on 34 race, class, gender, and sexuality that are crucial to understanding the slacker in contrast to those who have been stereotyped as lazy and understood as being in a constant state of arrested development. In its deployment of a slacker hero—a figure who is often perceived as squandering his potential but never fully divested of it—as the means by which the family-as-nation is restored, the Back to the Future trilogy also enables us to understand how the political, economic, cultural, and temporal ethos of the Reagan era produced the conditions for the contemporary slacker’s emergence. No Future In a letter to the editor published in the July 19, 1985 edition of The Washington Post, Helaine Michaels-Klein wrote, “The other night my husband and I went to see ‘Back to the Future’ in a movie theater in Maryland, and it took us back to the past.” Recounting the “unpleasant... screaming, stomping, booing and [uproarious] yelling” of the film’s mostly teen-aged audience, Michaels-Klein makes note of a specific scene in which the film’s protagonist, Marty McFly, visits his high school in 1955 to find it “sparkling clean” with “kids... dressed neatly and the walls... free of graffiti.” In 1955, she continues, “the movie theater in his neighborhood featured a western; in 1985, it is a porn house.” The experience of watching Back to the Future in the theater serves as a harsh reminder of the stark differences between the time of her youth and the 1985 of her present: “As I twirled my feet in the sticky mess under my seat and pushed away some popcorn with my big toe, I thought about how clean movie theaters were in 1955 and remembered being reprimanded by an usher for a loud whisper during my youth. When I went to the ladies’ room the other night, I was also aware of the untidiness and the ‘idioms’ written on the restroom doors.” Ultimately, her praise for Back to the Future is 35 informed not necessarily by her enjoyment of the film itself, but in its “[extreme effectiveness] in showing how society has deteriorated.” 37 The belief that American society had deteriorated since the 1950s was crucial to the Reaganite right’s rise to power and its vision to restore the United States to its former glory. Emerging from the economic crises of the 1970s, the Reaganite right effectively utilized these crises not only to demonize the liberal economic, political, and social policies of the 1960s and 70s but also to argue that the nation’s future, under Democratic leadership, was in peril. In his 1979 announcement seeking the Republican nomination for president, Ronald Reagan stated, “There are those in our land today... who would have us believe that the United States, like other great civilizations of the past, has reached the zenith of its power... I cannot and will not stand by and see this great country destroy itself... I don’t agree that our nation must resign itself to inevitable decline.” 38 Throughout his presidency, Reagan regularly deployed negative characterizations of liberal futurity in order to suggest that, as Lee Edelman might put it, if left to the devices of the Democrats, the nation had “no future.” At the start of Back to the Future, Marty McFly’s (Michael J. Fox) future prospects are looking dim. After taking a brief detour to test out a guitar amplifier that Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) has built for him, he arrives late to school. Before he walks in through the front entrance he is stopped by his girlfriend, Jennifer Parker (Claudia Wells), who tells him that the principal, Mr. Strickland (James Tolkan), is looking for him. “If you’re caught,” she reminds him, “it’ll be four tardies in a row.” As they attempt to sneak into class they are found out and Strickland admonishes him for his 37 Michaels-Klein, Helaine. "Back to the Future." The Washington Post 19 July 1985: A24. 38 "Ronald Reagan's announcement for Presidential Candidacy." 13 Nov. 1979. <http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/reference/11.13.79.html> 36 complete lack of investment in his own education. Naming Doc Brown as one source of Marty’s troubles, Strickland tells him, “This so-called Doctor Brown is dangerous, he’s a real nutcase. You hang around with him, you’re gonna end up in big trouble!” Marty responds sarcastically, “Oh yes, sir,” inflaming the principal, who retorts: “You’ve got a real attitude problem, McFly. You’re a slacker! You remind me of your father when he went here. He was a slacker, too!... No McFly ever amounted to anything in the history of Hill Valley!” Marty’s indifference to his education and his association with Doc Brown, Strickland implies, is evidence that he is squandering his potential. 39 In The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed writes, “The child...is the site of potential. What happens to the child will shape what the child can become; the child’s presumed emptiness becomes an imperative to shape its becoming. Education becomes about directing such potentiality; about steering the child in the right direction.” 40 Here we can see how Marty’s refusal to be “steered in the right direction” informs Strickland’s diagnosis of him as a slacker who will “never amount to anything” so long as he maintains his current course. The principal’s efforts to set Marty straight, “of getting the would-be subject to face the right way such that [he] can receive the right impressions,” reflects Ahmed’s assessment that “Education involves being directed not only by being turned around but by being turned ‘the right way’ round. To turn minds around is an educational imperative only given the presumption that the would-be subject is improperly aligned.” 41 39 The use of the present progressive rather than the past tense is crucial here. As I will discuss later in this chapter, the slacker is almost always a redeemable figure whereas, for example, welfare recipients who have been characterized as lacking personal responsibility and a strong work ethic are often framed as having squandered their potential, rendering the possibility of potential's actualization impossible due to the dependence fostered by the welfare state. 40 Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2010. 54. 41 Ibid. 37 Figure 1. “You’re a slacker!” Back to the Future. Universal, 1985. While Strickland concludes that Marty, like his father and ancestors, will never amount to anything, the film uses this scene as the first step in establishing that Marty has no future. In “Reordering Work and Destabilizing Masculinity,” Jane Kenway and Anna Kraack write that “Many young people feel that they have no future due to the lack of jobs, and their subsequent feelings of worthlessness are exacerbated by the... work ethic” which, despite precarious economic conditions that make employment an increasingly difficult and unlikely possibility, remains strong. 42 While Marty’s work ethic when it comes to school is practically nonexistent, his lack of investment is informed not only by broader economic conditions that the film later reveals, but also by his family’s apparent downward mobility. In a later scene, which I will return to in greater detail, the downward mobility of the McFly family is represented by his lower-middle class, white- collar father George (Crispin Glover) and his older brother Dave (Marc McClure), a high 42 Kenway, Jane, and Anna Kraack. "Reordering Work and Destabilizing Masculinity." Learning to Labor in New Times. New York & London: Routledge Falmer, 2004. 103. 38 school graduate who works in the fast food industry, what Douglas Coupland refers to in his 1990 novel Generation X as a “low-pay... no-future job in the service sector.” 43 As Paul Willis explains in Learning to Labour, the disinterest and lack of investment in education for some working class youth is informed by their understanding that much of what they will learn in school will be useless to their future employment as they inevitably enter working class jobs. 44 Within the context of an economic system that is far more likely to reproduce class structures than lead to upward mobility, working class (male) youth “consciously reject the cultural and political implications of buying into the curriculum and accepting school authority.” 45 But unlike the other members of his family, who have resigned themselves to the miseries of their existence, Marty’s disinterest stems from both his observations of what education has wrought for his siblings and his dreams of becoming a musician. This too becomes a source of Marty’s increasing anxieties about his lack of futurity. After Mr. Strickland observes that Marty’s “band is on the roster for the dance auditions after school,” he quickly and dismissively asks Marty, “Why even bother, McFly? You don’t have a chance, you’re too much like your old man.” Marty defiantly responds, “Yeah? Well history’s gonna change.” Obviously foreshadowing his journey into the past, Marty’s defiance in this moment turns to disappointment as his band is quickly interrupted during their audition by one of the judges (played by none other than Huey Lewis), who tells Marty, “I’m afraid you’re just too darned loud.” This rejection causes Marty to question his dreams of rock stardom and as Marty and Jennifer walk through Hill Valley’s town square he gives expression to his 43 Coupland, Generation X, 5. 44 See Willis, Learning to labour. 45 Aronowitz, Stanley. "Forward." Learning to Labor in New Times. New York & London: Routledge Falmer, 2004. ix. 39 hopelessness in the face of what he feels is his inevitable rejection at the hands of record companies: “What if they say I’m no good? What if they say, ‘Get outta here, kid! You’ve got no future’,” gesturing to the crisis of reproductive futurity to come. This crisis serves as Marty’s primary motivation throughout the film as he must literally set time straight by ensuring, if not improving upon, the romantic relationship between his teen- aged parents to prevent his erasure from existence and history. As the Doc Brown of 1955 later explains, Marty’s journey into the past disrupts the space-time continuum, a continuum understood through normative, reproductive logics: “according to my theory, you interfered with your parents’ first meeting: if they don’t meet, they won’t fall in love, they won’t get married, they won’t have kids!” Doc asserts that Marty has altered “the natural course of time,” reflecting Edelman’s argument in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive of the inability, the impossibility, of conceiving of a future without the figure of the child, without heterosexual reproduction as the means by which we avert extinction. Focusing on this impossibility, Edelman writes, “the Child remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention” because the logics of heteronormativity, naturalized by virtue of the biological “imperative” of survival, renders the issue “unquestionable” and “self evident.” 46 “No future” is not limited to an expression of a crisis of reproductive futurity in Back to the Future but also refers to a crisis of futurity based on economic logics. Not only is Marty’s utterance of “no future” directly related to his future prospects (or lack thereof) as a professional musician, but it is stated against a backdrop of economic and moral decline, reminding us that heterosexual reproduction is not the only means by 46 Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. 2. 40 which we imagine normative futurity. In Hill Valley, California circa 1985, many of the town square businesses have been shut down or displaced due, in part, to the presence of the nearby Twin Pines Mall, and material signifiers of economic failure and moral decline appear everywhere: empty storefronts with tattered awnings display “Out of Business” signs behind dust covered windows; an adult bookstore with a gaudy fluorescent sign stands next to bail bonds and loan offices; a twenty-four hour triple-X movie theater announces a screening of Orgy American Style on its enormous marquee; and a Texaco station with a sign exclaiming “GAS WAR” serves as a reminder of the 1973 Oil Crisis, an event that inflamed and prolonged stagflation. 47 Against this backdrop, Marty’s inability to comprehend a future in which he isn’t making a living as a musician provides us with an insightful glimpse into how failure, both personal and economic, can often result in the belief that one has no future. In Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, Scott Sandage writes, “Failure imperils the future even more than it taints the past. What if I never bounce back? An American with no prospects or plans, with nothing to look forward to, almost ceases to exist.” 48 While Marty’s expression of “no future” suggests an individualized sense of failure, its contextualization within a setting of economic decline suggests that it is also expressive of present structural conditions and forces us to consider the ways in which the 47 In a featurette titled "The Making of Back to the Future," producer and screenwriter Bob Gale states that "What happened to everybody's home town is obviously the same thing. They built the mall out in the boonies and killed all the business downtown, and everything changed." "The Making of Back to the Future." Dir. Les Mayfield. 1985. Back to the Future: 25th Anniversary Trilogy. Universal, 2010. DVD. Gale also explains in a 2010 article debunking the "myths and misinformation" in reporting about the films that the presence of the triple-X theater and adult book shop "establishes that the town square of Hill Valley in 1985 is run down." Gale, Bob. “‘Back to the Future’ Myths and Misinformation Debunked.” BTTF.com. 11 Nov. 2010. <http://www.bttf.com/bttf-myths-and-misinformation-debunked-by-bob-gale.php> 48 Sandage, Scott. Born Losers: A History of Failure in America. Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 2005. 20. 41 reproductive and the economic are interlocking systems that inform how the future is understood and envisioned within the neoliberal imaginary. Figure 2. “No Future.” Back to the Future. Universal, 1985. As if to put the final nail in the coffin of futurity, Back to the Future takes us from Hill Valley’s town square to the McFly family dinner table, where we bear witness to a depressing scene of familial misery and stagnation. With her family gathered around the table, Marty’s mother Lorraine (Lea Thompson) drunkenly reminisces about her first date with George. As she tells the story of their first kiss to her disinterested children, her brief moment of nostalgic bliss comes to an abrupt end as she concludes, “It was then that I realized that I was going to spend the rest of my life with him,” which is delivered with an expression of miserable acceptance as she sadly stares at her oblivious husband and her children look on with mixed expressions of boredom, pity, and embarrassment. Lorraine’s brief moment of joyous reminiscence locates her happiness in the past, as she recalls the hopefulness and anticipation of a happy future in her youth that was not and could not be fulfilled: her marriage in the present lacks possibility insofar as the future 42 only holds more of the same, which is not much of a future at all. Lorraine’s sad realization that she has and will continue to spend the rest of her life with George grants significance to her earlier defense of her brother, Uncle “Jailbird” Joey, who we are told “didn’t make parole again.” Explaining to her children that “We all make mistakes in life,” this statement serves less as a defense of her incarcerated sibling and more as an expression of her own regrets. Rather than being the first time she’s told this story, her daughter Linda’s (Wendy Jo Sperber) annoyed response, “Yeah, mom. We know. You’ve told the story a million times,” makes clear the regularity of Lorraine’s nostalgic recollections, emphasizing that the past held a promise left unfulfilled in the present and gesturing toward the film’s deployment of repetition as a means of representing the present as one that has no future. Andrew Gordon writes, past and present are so collapsed in the plot of the movie that the young hero Marty’s life threatens to become nothing more than a rerun, like The Honeymooners episode repeated during two separate family dinners. The audience gets the eerie effect of instant replay when we see gestures, lines, or entire scenes from 1985 echoed almost word for word in 1955. The present reruns the past, or vice-versa. These characters seem subject to a sort of repetition compulsion, doomed to neurotic closed loops until Marty intervenes to rewrite the script. 49 While Gordon’s observation that “Marty’s life threatens to become nothing more than a rerun” is certainly true, Lorraine’s life does not threaten to become a rerun but already is one, as she is doomed to repeat her tale of young love “a million times” and, with every retelling, doomed to arrive at the same depressing realization. 49 Gordon, Andrew. “Back to the Future: Oedipus as Time Traveller.” Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 (November 1987): 374. 43 Figure 3. “...the rest of my life with him.” Back to the Future. Universal, 1985. While many of the “reruns” throughout the Back to the Future trilogy are utilized for comic effect, one rerun in particular directly informs Marty’s concern that he has “no future.” Upon his arrival in 1955, he witnesses a nearly identical interaction to the one he had with the principal in 1985, as Strickland tells his father, “You’re a slacker! Do you want to be a slacker for the rest of your life?” In In a Queer Time and Place, Jack Halberstam describes the “time of inheritance” as “an overview of generational time within which values, wealth, goods, and morals are passed through family ties from one generation to the next. It also connects the family to the historical past of the nation, and glances ahead to connect the family to the future of both familial and national stability.” 50 While the time of inheritance described by Halberstam is a dimension of heteronormative time, it takes on a paranoid character at the start of the film that forecloses rather than looks ahead to the future; a problem that must be corrected. 50 Halberstam, Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York & London: New York University Press, 2005. 5. 44 Rather than glancing ahead to connect the family to the future of both familial and national stability, Back to the Future’s early depiction of the McFlys offers us a gloomier portrayal of the reproductive time of inheritance, suggesting not only that George offers nothing worth inheriting, but that his children have, by and large, inherited his weaknesses. They are all slackers. Linda is an unemployed high school graduate who mostly stays at home when she isn’t unsuccessfully “chasing after boys.” And Marty’s older brother Dave is a twenty-two year old man who takes the bus to work at Burger King. 51 Eve Sedgwick writes, “The dogged, defensive narrative stiffness of a paranoid temporality... in which yesterday can’t be allowed to have differed from today and tomorrow must be even more so, takes its shape from a generational narrative that’s characterized by a distinctly Oedipal regularity and repetitiveness: it happened to my father’s father, it happened to my father, it is happening to me, it will happen to my son, and it will happen to my son’s son.” 52 Although Marty’s response to Strickland’s assertion that “No McFly ever amounted to anything in the history of Hill Valley” is that “history’s gonna change,” breaking free from the paranoid temporality of inheritance requires his direct intervention into his parents’ past, a revision of history itself, to break the cycle of repetition and restore futurity to the present. The Politics of Potential Back to the Future’s focus on the crisis of reproductive futurity reflects neoliberalism’s rendering of the family as the most basic system of economic support and dependence based on a heteronormative “common sense” that was put to the service of the Reaganite right’s promotion of neoliberal social and economic reform. Rather than 51 Coupland 5. Emphasis mine. 52 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2003. 147. 45 the reduction of economic crisis to a familial metaphor, Back to the Future’s focus on the crisis of family and reproductive futurity mirrors and elucidates the quotidian operations of neoliberalism in its idealized and most private form: the family. As Reagan put it, “family and community remain the moral core of our society, guardians of our values and hopes for the future. Family and community are the costars of [the] great American comeback. They are why we say tonight: Private values must be at the heart of public policies.” 53 During a time of economic uncertainty and a felt sense of marginalization on the part of privileged citizen-subjects, who attributed their newfound sense of exposure and vulnerability to the social upheavals of the 1960s and 70s, a predominantly white American public grew nostalgic for a period in U.S. history when the fantasy of the good life seemed more tangible and achievable. “The marketing of nostalgic images of normal, familial America that would define the utopian context for citizen aspiration,” Berlant writes, was a crucial component of the “successful transformations” that “reinvigorated the idea of the American Dream.” As Berlant explains, the American Dream is A popular form of political optimism, it fuses private fortune with that of the nation: it promises that if you invest your energies in work and family- making, the nation will secure the broader social and economic conditions in which your labor can gain value and your life can be lived with dignity. It is a story that addresses the fear of being stuck or reduced to a type, a redemptive story pinning its hope on class mobility. 54 The opening scenes from Back to the Future, through their depictions of the present as a time of economic stagnation, familial misery, and personal failure, signal the foreclosure of hope and the American Dream and therefore futurity. Ahmed explains that “hope is... a future-oriented emotion.... a feeling that is present (a pleasure in the mind) but is directed 53 Reagan, Ronald. "Address Before a Joint Session of Congress on the State of the Union." 4 February 1986. <http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1986/20486a.htm> 54 Berlant 3-4. 46 toward an object that is not yet present.... If the future is that which does not exist, what is always before us... Hope is a wish and expectation that a desired possibility is ‘becoming actual.’” 55 Lorraine’s brief moment of happiness at the dinner table locates that happiness in the past, identifying a particular moment (her first kiss with George at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance) as having held the potential for a hopeful and happy future. The failure of that potential’s realization defines her unhappiness in the present. Potential is a latency; it exists in the present but is directed toward the future. As Lorraine arrives at the sad conclusion that “It was then that I realized that I was going to spend the rest of my life with him,” the misery that defines her present and the repetition attributed to her storytelling mark the present as a time of squandered and irrevocable potential. Before his plans are thwarted by a group of Libyan nationalists from whom he stole plutonium to fuel his time-machine made out of a DeLorean, Doc tells Marty that he is going to travel into the future. His reasons give voice to the particular understanding of linear temporality and futurity that inform my understanding of Back to the Future’s construction of the present as having no future and the presumption of a positive outcome, of “progress,” often associated with potential. Doc explains, “I’ve always dreamed of seeing the future and looking beyond my years; seeing the progress of mankind.” But before he is able to travel to the future he is killed by the Libyans, erasing the possibility of futurity, of Doc’s ability to witness progress. This leaves us with the sense that there might not have been a future for him to go to at all. The notion of linear progression as marking another kind of progress, indicated by Doc’s enthusiasm, suggests not only a movement forward in time but the assumption, perhaps even the certainty, of development-as-improvement. This particular understanding of temporality 55 Ahmed 181-182. 47 is emphasized by the brief appearance of a van plastered with campaign posters for the re-election of “Goldie” Wilson (Donald Fullilove), Hill Valley’s African American mayor, which drives through the town square just moments before Marty’s lament regarding his own loss of futurity. “Re-Elect Mayor Goldie Wilson,” a voice shouts from mounted speakers, “’Progress’ is his middle name.” The appearance of this van and the campaign message’s association of Goldie Wilson with “progress” inform the neoliberal articulation of potential that is expressed throughout Back to the Future. Upon his arrival in 1955, Marty enters a diner in Hill Valley’s town square and meets his father for the first time. During this scene, we are introduced to Goldie who works in the diner as a bus boy. After George is harassed by his life-long bully Biff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson) and his cronies, Goldie encourages George to “stand tall” and “have some respect for himself,” telling him, “Don’t you know? If you let people walk all over you now, they’ll be walking over you for the rest of your life! Look at me. You think I’m going to spend the rest of my life in this slop house? No, sir! I’m going to make something of myself! I’m going to night school! And one day, I’m gonna be somebody!” Marty stares at Goldie, recognition dawning on him before he exclaims, “That’s right! He’s going to be mayor!” On the one hand, the advice Goldie gives George marks an all too familiar trope in American film wherein an African American dispenses wisdom drawn from racial oppression in order to help a white character overcome a personal and therefore private problem, undermining the significance of racial oppression through a colorblind universalism that implies an equivalence of experience. 56 Even more 56 Racial colorblindness is often referred to as "liberal racism." Rather than undermining my argument regarding the impact of the Reagan Revolution on normative understandings of potential, this serves as an indication of the extent to which neoliberalism has transformed mainstream American political ideology on both sides of the isle. See, for example: Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism without Racists: Color-Blind 48 strikingly, Goldie’s expression of his own aspirations contextualizes his eventual ascendancy to the position of mayor of Hill Valley—“I’ll be the most powerful man in this town”—within the exclusive framework of individual achievement through the neoliberal dictates of hard work (“I’m going to night school!”) and personal responsibility (“I’m going to make something of myself!”). Here, November 5, 1955 becomes significant as it allows the film to forego any discussion of the civil rights movement that would ultimately make his mayoral election possible, feeding into a belief that social progress naturally occurs with the passage of time rather than through the efforts and interventions of social movements. Time travel does not merely serve as the means by which Marty is able to go back in time to extract the untapped potential of the 1950s, but enables him to skip over that tumultuous period of American history that the Reaganite right worked so tirelessly to undermine. Skipping over the tumultuous time between December of 1955 (the start of the Montgomery Bus Boycott) and Marty’s 1985 present, Back to the Future constructs Wilson’s rise as being the sole product of his individual efforts rather than an achievement made possible by the civil rights movement. 57 The actualization of Goldie Wilson’s potential through the neoliberal dictates of hard work and personal responsibility, expressed in his decision to “make something of himself,” is echoed in a line that repeats throughout the film and constitutes Back to the Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003; Wise, Tim. Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equity. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2010; Zamudio, Margaret M. and Francisco Rios. "From Traditional to Liberal Racism: Living Racism In the Everyday." Sociological Perspectives, Vol. 49, Issue 4 (Winter 2006): 483-501. 57 I am indebted to Lauren Berlant's reading of Forrest Gump in The Queen of American Goes to Washington City (180-186) as well as Martin F. Manalansan's discussion of Brokeback Mountain in "Colonizing Time and Space: Race and Romance in Brokeback Mountain" for providing me with the language and framework for my reading of this scene. 49 Future’s neoliberal maxim: “If you put your mind to it you can accomplish anything.” With Marty’s help, George rises to the challenge of forging an idealized romance with Lorraine, fulfilling his masculine (and the couple’s reproductive) potential. When Marty returns to 1985 he finds his family and home completely transformed; the living room is no longer the poorly lit apotheosis of lower-middle class kitsch but a sleek 1985 version of upper-middle class chic; his brother Dave and sister Linda are transformed into young, upwardly mobile professionals (his brother is now very seriously reading Forbes rather than watching a rerun of The Honeymooners with childish glee); Biff goes from being George’s asshole boss to, essentially, George’s personal handyman as we watch him wax the McFly family BMW; his parents are no longer miserable and sexless, but well- dressed and openly flirtatious; and George is no longer a weak-willed and bumbling nerd but a successful science fiction author, who repeats the phrase Marty used to inspire him in 1955—“If you put your mind to it you can accomplish anything”—which is dispensed as fatherly advice back to Marty as he looks at everything and everyone with astonishment. In tracking Marty’s journey from the hopeless present to a nostalgic past and his “return” to an upwardly mobile, aspirational present—a present brimming with potential—the film suggests that, as its title makes clear, the future has been restored. Marty hasn’t come back to the present, but has gone “back to the future.” Tyler Wantuch argues that Marty’s return to an upwardly mobile 1985 at film’s end, in the context of a time-travel narrative, is an attempt to undercut the fantasy of “upward mobility in modern times. It’s as if [director Robert Zemeckis is] saying the American dream was once possible but now is not.... There would need to be a dramatic 50 Figure 4. McFly Family Living Room, circa 1985a. Back to the Future. Universal, 1985. Figure 5. McFly Family Living Room, circa 1985b. Back to the Future. Universal, 1985. 51 Figure 6. McFly Family, circa 1985a. Back to the Future. Universal, 1985. Figure 7. Linda and Dave McFly, circa 1985b. Back to the Future. Universal, 1985. 52 Figure 8. George McFly, circa 1985a. Back to the Future. Universal, 1985. Figure 9. George and Lorraine McFly, circa 1985b. Back to the Future. Universal, 1985. 53 change in the McFly’s upbringing to ever have any mobility. Luckily for Marty, George McFly dramatically changes and poof, the children are now successful. Not because they have worked hard, but because their father has set them up for success.” 58 Thus, the very device that sets the plot in motion becomes the means by which the film dismantles the logics that inform its conclusion. The resolution of Marty’s initial crisis cannot be accomplished within the economic and familial climate established at the start of the film, and the only means by which the crisis can be resolved is for it to be avoided altogether. By traveling back in time and helping his father realize his manly potential and encouraging his aspirations, the weaknesses of the father that informed the McFly family’s failures are done away with and the upward mobility that was possible in the economically prosperous post-war past of the 1950s informs his family’s success in the conclusion’s present tense. If the Reaganite right really wanted to restore the American Dream, this reading implies, they would have to build a time-machine. But it is precisely in the placement of this potential for upward mobility and prosperity in the past that the film ultimately reiterates and reifies the valorization of the 1950s within the nostalgic Reaganite imaginary. The film’s attempts to counter this nostalgia also fall woefully short. 59 Upon his arrival in 1955 in a time-machine made out of a DeLorean, Marty enters Hill Valley to the tune of The Chordette’s “Mr. Sandman,” which is paired with Marty’s determination that “This has got to be a dream,” and denotes the nostalgic fantasy of the 1950s in which 58 Wantuch, Tyler. "Marty's Cowboy Values and the American Way in 'Back to the Future'." FirstShowing. 3 Nov. 2012. <http://www.firstshowing.net/2012/martys-cowboy-values-and-the-american-way-in-back-to- the-future/> 59 Wantuch cites the scene involving Goldie Wilson that I discuss above as a "more powerful vision of the American Dream" than the one offered at the film's conclusion, suggesting the appeal of this neoliberal vision despite, or perhaps because of, its decontextualization from history and its privatization of black social mobility. 54 he finds himself. He is in a dream, the film implies, but it is not his dream. After witnessing George get bullied by Biff, Marty follows him only to discover that his father is a peeping Tom. When George falls out of the tree from which he is watching Lorraine undress, Marty pushes George out of the way of his grandfather’s car only to get hit himself and passes out on the pavement. When he comes to, he is greeted by the comforting sound of his mother’s voice and tells her, “I had a horrible nightmare. I had a dream that I went back in time. It was terrible.” Comfort turns to horror as Lorraine tells him, “Well, you’re safe and sound now, back in good old 1955.” Marty’s description of his travel to the nostalgic past as a “nightmare” suggests that the film means to disrupt the fantasies that played a central role in the Reaganite imaginary. But the shocks that Marty experiences in the past that disrupt his understanding of the 1950s as a solidly conservative era are, for the most part, limited to Lorraine, who in 1985 insists that “When I was your age I never chased a boy or called a boy or sat in a parked car with a boy.” In The Permissive Society, Alan Petigny notes that “when conservatives look back to the 1950s, they see an era of sexual reticence, a time when conservative Christianity was on the march, a halcyon era of order and tradition untarnished by the turmoil that would come.” 60 As Marty discovers over the course of the movie, his mother is not as prudish as she makes herself out to be. The image of 1950s sexual conservatism quickly dissolves, much to Marty’s dismay, as his mother 60 Petigny, Alan. The Permissive Society: America, 1941-1965. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 2. Petigny challenges understandings of the 50s as a "solidly conservative era" during which "oppositional developments" were "undercurrents—mere rumblings—that went against the dominant mood," "seeds of discontent" that would "blossom in the ensuing turmoil of the 1960s," arguing that they fail to recognize the "unprecedented challenge to traditional moral constraints" that arose during the 1940s and 50s and had, in fact, "been unfolding for well over five decades" (1-3). 55 aggressively pursues him as part of the film’s comedic time-travel incest plot. 61 While we might argue that Back to the Future’s rendering of Lorraine’s teenaged sexuality contradicts the more overt conservatism she expresses in 1985, calling into question what Petigny reminds us is a predominantly right-wing understanding of the 1950s as a time of sexual reticence, the fact that Lorraine’s sexuality is always already undermined by the incest taboo also diminishes the effectiveness of this portrayal. It ultimately forecloses the possibility of a fuller expression of her sexuality and restricts it to the private realm of heterosexual marriage as the film reroutes her desire—vacating it of sexuality and rendering it into a more innocent romantic love in the process—toward George as the “appropriate” object of her affections. There is a notable moment where, parked in front of the high school with Marty prior to the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance, Lorraine tells him, “Marty, I’m almost eighteen years old! It’s not like I’ve never parked before,” indicating that she has engaged in some form of physical intimacy in the past (though this is left vague). When she drinks alcohol in the car, Marty almost immediately stops her, telling her that “You might regret it later in life,” referring to the 1985 Lorraine’s alcoholism. When he admonishes her for smoking a cigarette, she finally tells him, “You’re beginning to sound just like my mother.” While all of this reveals that Lorraine is, or at the very least was, far less conservative than she lets on to her children, these forays into “bad behavior” in her adolescence ultimately serve the primary purpose of making her a better mother in the renewed and restored 1985 to which Marty returns. Contrasting her conservative disapproval of Jenny’s “forwardness” in calling Marty at home at the start of the movie to 61 For more on the Oedipal dynamics of Back to the Future, see Gordon, "Back to the Future: Oedipus as Time Traveller." 56 her approval of Jenny (“I sure like her, Marty.”) and awareness of Marty’s plan to take his girlfriend “up to the lake this weekend” at film’s end, her adolescent sexuality is ultimately portrayed as informing her revivified role as a “good” mother. 62 In this sense, the realization of Lorraine’s potential is always already limited to her role as mother and wife. Meanwhile, George’s success as a science-fiction author reveals that the actualization of his potential exceeds the limits of his role within the neoliberal family. If George is able to actualize his potential by putting into practice the advice “If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything,” then Lorraine is ultimately portrayed as the passive beneficiary of his potential’s actualization. Figure 10. “If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.” Back to the Future. Universal, 1985. Giorgio Agamben reminds us in Potentialities that “To believe that will has the power over potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a decision that puts an 62 Duggan notes that "In neoliberal discourse, married women are assumed to be responsible for children and dependent on wage-earning husbands, and are often advised to stay at home during their children's early years to build self-esteem and independence in the young" (17). 57 end to the ambiguity of potentiality—this is the perpetual illusion of morality.” 63 Rather than disconnecting mind from matter, “If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything,” gives expression to the idea that hard work and determination will enable the accomplishment of “anything.” Despite the upward redistribution of wealth and power resulting from economic neoliberalization and the failure of trickle-down economics to yield any benefits for the poor, let alone improve the economy as a whole, Reagan was able to convince Americans that his vision for the future was the only viable one, not only by nurturing a longing for an idealized past, but by casting his own policies as the means of unlocking America’s squandered potential. If stagflation represented, as the name suggests, the halting of economic progress, Reaganomics was proposed as a means of lifting the nation out of stagnation and enabling the actualization of an untapped potential that had been impeded by over-regulation. The regulatory function of the state under Keynesianism was viewed as an impediment to potential insofar as it limited the ability of businesses and corporations to maximize profits and productivity in addition to fostering dependence and irresponsibility. Deregulation was seen as a means of unlocking or unleashing the potential of individuals and to a far greater extent corporations and businesses; a potential that had festered under the regulatory restrictions of liberal economic policies. By dismantling any state fetters to free trade and private property, individuals would become “free” to realize their entrepreneurial potential while simultaneously rendering them responsible for their own welfare. The actualization of potential under the material constraints and normative expectations of neoliberal capitalism demands particular forms of investment that are 63 Agamben, Giorgio. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 1999. 254. Emphasis mine. 58 both capitalist and heteronormative, dictating the terms of self-realization as a successful citizen-subject according to the neoliberal imperatives of hard work and personal responsibility. The political establishment, from the Reagan era onward, has utilized these concepts in an effort to create the illusion of guaranteed upward mobility and success, simultaneously shifting attention away from systemic inequalities and the vicissitudes of capitalism that bar access to the good life. The responsibility for failing to achieve upward mobility and success fell on the individual for not working hard enough, being responsible enough or ambitious enough. By shifting responsibility away from the state and onto the individual and family, failure was made to seem exceptional and was often explained as resulting from a lack of personal responsibility or the unwillingness to work hard enough to achieve success within an allegedly free and indiscriminate marketplace. Under this regime, the actualization of potential is always already rendered through normative understandings of success, while the squandering of potential may end in failure. Figure 11. “Department of Social Services.” Back to the Future. Universal, 1985. 59 Back to the Future gestures towards this with its iconic “clock tower,” which is not a clock tower at all but actually the Hill Valley Department of Social Services, the agency responsible for the distribution of welfare in California and the setting for Marty’s lament regarding his future with which this essay began. Ronald Reagan himself identified the welfare state as the cause of the squandering of human potential in his 1986 State of the Union (in which he also quotes the line from Back to the Future, “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”), stating that “In the welfare culture, the breakdown of family, the most basic support system has reached crisis proportions... After hundreds of billions of dollars in poverty programs, the plight of the poor grows more painful. But the waste in dollars and cents pales before the most tragic loss: the sinful waste of human spirit and potential.” 64 In contrast to the seeming actualization of potential expressed by Reagan’s “morning in America,” wherein “The American people brought us back [from recession] with quiet courage and common sense, with undying faith that... the future will be ours,” we are presented with those who have squandered their potential. 65 For the “great American comeback” that Reagan imagined to be realized, family and community would have to be defined by normative values and hopes for the future informed by middle class logics. Those that did not adhere to these values had no future. Reagan provides a point of contrast, differentiating the family-as-costar of the “great American comeback” from those that represented a threat to national values and thus national prosperity. The articulation of this failure vis-à-vis potential is additionally telling. It enables us to understand that the realization of ones potential in this case is understood as 64 Reagan, Ronald. “State of the Union,” 1986. 65 Ibid. 60 achievable only through independence, self-control, hard work, and personal responsibility. The Right attacked the welfare state as evidence of the failed liberal economic policies that they blamed for the recession of the 1970s and early 80s, arguing that the system of dependence encouraged by these so-called “entitlement” programs was halting national progress and threatened the sacred institution of the nuclear family. Reagan’s attacks against the welfare state on the national stage, starting with his demonization of Linda Taylor, the forty-seven year old “Cadillac-driving welfare queen,” during his 1976 run for the Republican presidential nomination, played a significant role in shaping “the core issue of neoliberal policy priorities—welfare ‘reform’.” 66 Stereotypes of idleness were deployed as part of the pathologization of welfare recipients (“welfare queens”) and were incorporated into the “logics” of anti-welfare discourse in order to suggest not only that welfare fostered dependence on the state and in turn promoted laziness in its recipients, but also reproduced idleness in children. 67 In Doing Nothing, Tom Lutz writes that “Anger at slackers... has fueled the assault on the welfare state these past dozen or so years” sparking “the fury at ‘welfare queens,’ who, we’ve heard and read, are vampiric layabouts sucking the lifeblood out of honest, hardworking taxpayers.” 68 Lutz’s failure to account for the active racialization of welfare recipients in political rhetoric reflects his general tendency to overlook matters of race in his book. Recounting an incident in which, after being told about his work, a man 66 Duggan 40. 67 In Doing Nothing, Tom Lutz points out, “From George Wallace’s attack on ‘welfare loafers’ to Lester Maddox’s claim that the Aid to Dependent Children program was ‘a reward for promiscuity’ to Newt Gingrich’s claim that the welfare state taught children ‘not to work, not to acquire property, not to learn to read and write and to wait around for that welfare check,’ the welfare recipient has been damned as just pure lazy” (9). 68 Ibid 8. 61 asked Lutz, “You’re going to write something about the blacks, right?... You know, they’re lazy,” he quickly passes over the opportunity to consider the importance of race in creating distinctions between what we commonly think of as “slackers” and those who have been stereotyped as lazy, using this as an opportunity to argue that sociological data shows no correlation between race and laziness rather than considering the ways in which race, gender, class, and even sexuality are categories that enable us to make important distinctions between the slacker and those Others whom based on race, class, gender, and sexuality have been pathologized as lazy and irresponsible. 69 On the one hand, there are certainly reasons why such a consideration might be absent from the broader discussion of slackers in Doing Nothing; after all, to exclude consideration of non-white slackers would mean to forget, for example, the significant contribution of the comedy duo Cheech & Chong to the slacker ouvre, especially considering the associations made between a slacker’s unwillingness to work, his avoidance of military service, and his partial indebtedness to hippy and stoner culture as found in the character of Anthony “Man” Stoner (Tommy Chong) in their 1978 film Up in Smoke. On the other hand, the omission of a more nuanced consideration of the roles that race, class, gender, and sexuality play in popular representations of the slacker in film and its influence on how the slacker circulates in the American popular imaginary, that is, as a white, middle-class, heterosexual male does suggest a universalization of the slacker that ultimately fails to account for how slacking signifies differently based on the varying intersections of these categories. To borrow from Andrew Knighton, “The ‘idleness’ of the wealthy urban 69 Ibid 315-316. 62 gentleman... clearly signifies differently than the ‘idleness’ of the indigent and dissolute vagrant.” 70 But Lutz’s identification of welfare as having something to do with slackers remains important and generative. When we consider the slacker’s racial, gender, sexual, and class identities we will almost always, particularly when considering cinematic and televisual representations of the slacker, arrive at the same conclusion: the slacker is white, male, heterosexual and, more often than not, middle class. Accounting for the ways in which neoliberalism dismantled the welfare state by shifting the burden of a social and economic safety net from the state to the family, we can begin to understand that it was precisely this shift that enabled the emergence of the slacker within the context of the American middle class, a crucial characteristic of the contemporary slacker that Lutz, however briefly, identifies. 71 That is, the middle and upper-middle classes were better suited to take on the burden of financial dependence with regard to their lazy or, as the changing economic climate in the United States resulted in the ever decreasing availability of full time employment and significant increases in part-time jobs and unemployment, partially employed and unemployed children. This prompted Douglas Coupland to coin the term “safety net-ism”: “the belief that there will always be a financial and emotional safety net to buffer life’s hurts. Usually parents” in his 1991 novel Generation X. In contrast to the normative model of potential deployed by the Reaganite right in the service of neoliberalization and the dismantling of the welfare state, José Muñoz takes 70 Knighton, Andrew Lyndon. Idle Threats: Men and the Limits of Productivity in 19th-Century America. New York & London: New York University Press, 2012. 6. 71 Lutz writes, “Despite slurs about laziness in the lower classes, slackers are almost entirely drawn from the middle class or are on their way down to meet it” (52). 63 up Agamben’s insistence upon the ambiguity of potentiality in his reading of Ernst Bloch’s articulation of “educated hope,” a hope that is “marked by an enduring indeterminacy” in Cruising Utopia. 72 Muñoz refuses a pragmatic politics and insists upon a queer utopianism precisely because the “do-able” suggested by pragmatism often leads to conventionality (for Muñoz in the form of a homonormative politics) which restricts possibilities rather than opening them up. The conservative, normative, utopian optimism of the Reagan era looked to the past as a model for the future precisely because the past- as-model offered seemingly pragmatic solutions to the problems of the present: if it happened before, we can make it happen again. This optimism was, of course, utopian only insofar as the unconflicted past that the Reaganite right imagined and longed to return to was, to recall Foucault, a “fundamentally unreal space,” which is to say that it was no place at all. 73 In The Female Complaint, Berlant importantly reminds us that “one of the main utopias is normativity itself, here a felt condition of general belonging and an aspirational site of rest and recognition in and by a social world.” 74 In contrast to the normative utopianism fostered by neoliberalism, the trailer mash-up “Brokeback to the Future” reflects, to a certain extent, Muñoz’s queer utopianism by engaging the “ephemeral traces, flickering illuminations” of queer potentiality in Back to the Future. In re-framing Back to the Future as a queer narrative, it draws our attention not only to the homosocial relationship between Doc Brown and Marty, but highlights particular scenes from the film that suggest that their relationship is 72 Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York & London: New York University Press, 2009. 3. 73 Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16, No. 1 (Spring 1986): 24. 74 Berlant, Lauren. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2008. 5. 64 queer. When Marty is caught attempting to sneak into school late, Strickland states: “Am I to understand you’re still hanging around with Dr. Emmett Brown, McFly? This so- called Doctor Brown is dangerous; he’s a real nutcase. You hang around with him, you’re gonna end up in trouble.” Strickland’s warning that if Marty continues to “hang around with him, [he’s] gonna end up in big trouble” already hints at the potential dangers of Marty’s friendship with Doc Brown. The disparity in age between Marty and Doc may be trouble enough, but as we learn soon after, Doc Brown himself is a bit queer, adding a dimension of homosexual panic to Strickland’s admonition. Using footage from every movie in the series, with a particular emphasis on Back to the Future III, Brokeback to the Future clarifies the homosocial intimacy of their relationship in part by bringing to the fore the homosocial bond of cowboys as well as the emotional tension that builds between them in the third and final installment of the trilogy (not to mention the obvious reference to Brokeback Mountain both in the video’s title and its use of Brokeback’s now iconic score). When Doc Brown falls in love with Clara Clayton (Mary Steenburgen), Marty is incensed, exhibiting what could be read as genuine concern for a friend who may not be willing to return to his own time. Of course, Marty’s frustration is also borne of jealousy. As Marty’s mentor, Doc must teach him to grow up and, in a gesture that smacks of romantic love, move on. In this way, the overall arc of Back to the Future reflects Richard Klein’s interpretation of Freud wherein he asserts that “heterosexuality in the male… presupposes a homosexual phase as the condition of its normal possibility.” 75 Upon the destruction of the DeLorean, Doc Brown visits Marty and 75 Quoted in Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. 23. I return to this topic during my discussion of "bromance" in 21st century slacker films in Chapter 3. 65 his girlfriend Jennifer, heterosexual, time-traveling nuclear family in tow, and tells them “your future hasn’t been written yet. No one’s has. Your future is whatever you make it, so make it a good one,” hinting at Marty and Jennifer’s own happily-ever-after. At the heart of every movie in the trilogy is a narrative of normative temporality’s disruption and restoration “for the better,” one that runs along the same space-time continuum as Marty’s own development from slacker into adult. At the conclusion of the Back to the Future trilogy, Doc Brown tells Marty, prior to taking off in his time-travelling locomotive, that “The future is whatever you make it, so make it a good one.” The idea that one can “make” their future, let alone “make it a good one” certainly serves to reify the neoliberal logics that inform the trilogy’s articulation of potential. Yet if we understand the neoliberal formulation of potential as grounded in normative ideals of aspiration—through family, work, and so on—we can begin to understand that this particular form of potential is no longer adequate, if it ever was, in light of the limitations to achievement that have been made all too clear by the Great Recession. Rather than fear uncertainty, we might embrace it, taking up the “whatever” in Doc’s parting words and all of the ambiguity it signals (rather than the dismissal with which we might often associate it) and consider “other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds”; worlds opened up when we stop relying on outdated and outmoded understandings of success, and the limited formulations of work as, in Reagan’s words, “good in and of itself.” 76 The Re(agan) Decade “We are still living in the Reagan era today,” journalist Mark Hertsgaard tells us at the start of the 2011 documentary Reagan. Introducing a montage of clips taken from 76 Muñoz 1. 66 the news, debates, and speeches of the candidates for the 2008 Republican presidential primaries, the film reminds us of the extent to which Reagan has been invoked since the start of the 2008 recession. 77 The current, nostalgic obsession with Reagan serves as a reminder of the ongoing effects his neoliberal policies have had on economic, political, social, and cultural life in the United States. This nostalgia often reveals the contradictory nature of the post-war conservative push for (re)privatization that is the hallmark of neoliberalism. The increasingly blurred distinctions between pro-big business Republicans and their more socially and religiously conservative counterparts— exemplified by the Tea Party, though it too has been strongly influenced by bourgeois interests and financial backing—reveals the ways in which nostalgia itself informs the contradictory but nevertheless comprehensible desires and ideologies of the American Right. Thus, while Reagan ushered in the neoliberal order which arguably led to the economic collapse of 2008 through deregulation, privatization, and the upward redistribution of wealth that have come to define the urgencies of our present, many Americans still cling to the idealized figure of Reagan as the man who, as one visitor to Reagan’s hometown of Dixon, Illinois put it, “helped bring America back to its roots: family, home, community.” 78 Nostalgia for the Reagan era is not merely about political invocation and a longing to return to our roots, but a desire for resurrection. Leading up to the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, rumors circulated that Reagan 77 A video tracking the numerous mentions of Reagan during the January 10, 2008 Republican presidential debate from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pesbcAei6p8. 78 Reagan. Directed by Eugene Jarecki. HBO, 2011. 67 himself would be the convention’s surprise speaker. 79 Made possible by the same holographic imaging technology that briefly brought rapper Tupac Shakur “back to life” at the 2012 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, the media was abuzz with news that a Reagan hologram would be making an appearance at the RNC to endorse Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. These rumors were quickly denied by Digital Domain CEO John Textor, whose company was partly responsible for developing the Tupac hologram. But it was later revealed by Tony Reynolds, the founder of crowdsourcing website A KickIn Crowd, that a Reagan hologram created by AV Concepts—another company responsible for Coachella’s Tupac performance—had been set to appear at a different venue, but the appearance was cancelled “out of concern the deceased Reagan might outshadow the very-much-alive Romney.” 80 Music critic Simon Reynolds refers to the 2000s as “The ‘Re’ Decade” in his 2011 book Retromania. Citing pop culture’s recent obsession with revivals, reissues, remakes, and reenactments, Reynolds’s critique of pop culture’s “addiction to its own past” itself is filled with a nostalgia for what he sees as the bygone days of newness and originality in music, theater, film, and television. Ironically, Tom Shales made similar observations in his 1986 article “The Re Decade” for Esquire magazine, noting that the 80s were a decade of replays, reruns, and recycling of popular culture. Discussing the popularity of Back to the Future, “a phrase which almost sums the Eighties up,” Shales notes that “We are not amazed at the thought of time travel because we do it every 79 To the disappointment of many, it was Clint Eastwood and not Ronald Reagan that took the stage. Rather than a rousing speech by Reagan as Republican messiah, convention goers and television audiences were treated to Eastwood speaking to an empty chair. 80 Welikala, Judith. “Rumored Reagan Hologram is (Apparently) Real.” TIME. 4 Sept. 2012. <http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/09/04/rumored-reagan-hologram-is-apparently-real/> 68 day.” 81 In the 1980s, Andrew Gordon observed that “The majority of recent time-travel films do not, in fact, concern the future at all but deal instead with an escape into an idealized past in a desperate attempt to alter the present and future.” Reflecting “a growing dissatisfaction with a present that is sensed as dehumanized, diseased, out of control, and perhaps doomed,” time-travel films of the 1980s expressed an “unspoken feeling” that “Somewhere along the line... something went drastically wrong; if we could only return to the appropriate crossroads in the past and correct things, we could mend history and return to a revised, glorious present or future, the time line we truly deserve.” 82 In the present, we are witnessing a nostalgic consumerism that has exerted a significant impact on the marketplace. The nostalgia of now adult Gen-Xers, whose childhood toys—such as Transformers, G.I. Joes, and even Legos—have been turned into movies and television shows reflects a larger phenomenon of nostalgic consumerism, as adults who now have the capital to do so are able to revisit and (re)acquire the beloved objects of their childhoods. In some instances, the availability of capital also enables Gen-Xers to live out unfulfilled fantasies and finally sate their childhood desires. In an article titled “For the DeLorean, it’s back to the present,” Los Angeles Times writer Martin Zimmerman recounts the story of Danny Botkin, whose “love affair with the DeLorean got off to an unpromising start”: It was the early ‘80s and a teen-age Botkin was tagging along while his father shopped for a new car. A Ford dealer had a rear-engined, gull- winged DeLorean on display, and the flash of stainless steel automotive skin caught Danny’s eye. 81 Reynolds’ text shows no indication that he was aware of this earlier article at the time of Retromania’s publication. Shales, Tom. “The Re Decade.” Esquire. (March 1986): 67. Quoted in Gordon 372-385. 82 Gordon 373. 69 “I was smitten,” Botkin, now 40, recalls. “I said, ‘Hey Dad, let’s get this.’ “He got a Bronco instead.” Botkin had to grow up and buy his dream car himself. He drives a restored DeLorean modeled after the one that served as a time machine in the 1980s blockbuster “Back to the Future.” 83 In addition to the DeLorean’s minor resurgence in popularity, Back to the Future has served as inspiration for several other recent products marketed to middle, upper-middle, and upper class Gen-Xers. In 2011, Nike announced that it would release 1,500 pairs of the Nike MAG, a shoe featured in Back to the Future II, for a charity auction for the Michael J. Fox Foundation to fund Parkinson’s research. 84 A similarly inspired Mattel released a replica hoverboard from the same film in 2012 for $120.00. 85 Earlier this year, it was announced that a new musical based on Back to the Future would hit the stage in London’s West End. 86 In the case of Back to the Future, amongst other 80s and 90s pop culture hallmarks, the proliferation of products inspired by or directly tied-in to the film trilogy involves a desire to revisit childhood, to revisit the time of potential, not only to relive the past but to imagine “what if?” This “what if?” informs the desire to return to childhood in the present but with the added benefit of an income provided by employment in adulthood as the means by which all of the desires one had but could not fulfill with a meager allowance can now become a reality. Although the retreat from the imperatives of consumer capitalism would serve as a basis for the retreat of Douglas 83 Zimmerman, Martin. “For the DeLorean, it’s back to the present.” Los Angeles Times. 28 July 2007. <http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-garage28jul28,1,6560463.story>. 84 One pair of these shoes fetched $3,500 on eBay. Another, signed by Back to the Future star Michael J. Fox, brought in $37,500 in eight minutes. Tschorn, Adam. “Nike offers up Marty McFly’s ‘Back to the Future’ shoes.” Los Angeles Times. 9 Sept. 2011. <http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/alltherage/2011/09/nike- offers-up-marty-mcflys-back-to-the-future-shoes.html>. 85 “Back to the Future™ Hoverboard (Prop Replica).” NA. <http://www.mattycollector.com/store/matty/ en_US/pd/ThemeID.1298800/productID.247060500#>. 86 Ayers, Mike. "'Back to the Future' Musical Confirmed for 2015." Rolling Stone. 31 Jan. 2014. <http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/back-to-the-future-musical-confirmed-for-2015-20140131>. 70 Coupland’s slacker characters in Generation X, explored in the next chapter, the untapped potential of the past, it seems, is the untapped buying potential of the unemployed and unemployable child under consumer capitalism, a potential finally realized in adulthood in our 21st century present. 71 Chapter Two Oh Well, Whatever, Nevermind: Generation X and the Ambivalence of Disenchantment They have trouble making decisions. They would rather hike in the Himalayas than climb a corporate ladder. They have few heroes, no anthems, no style to call their own. They crave entertainment, but their attention span is as short as one zap of a TV dial. They hate yuppies, hippies and druggies. They postpone marriage because they dread divorce. They sneer at Range Rovers, Rolexes and red suspenders. What they hold dear are family life, local activism, national parks, penny loafers and mountain bikes. They possess only a hazy sense of their own identity but a monumental preoccupation with all the problems the preceding generation will leave for them to fix. This is the twentysomething generation... —David M. Gross and Sophfronia Scott, “Living: Proceeding with Caution,” TIME Magazine I found it hard, it’s hard to find Oh well, whatever, nevermind. —Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Nevermind On January 11, 1989, invoking a “great tradition of warnings in Presidential farewells,” Ronald Reagan stated, “We’re about to enter the nineties, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children... I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit.” 1 Reagan’s concern regarding the “eradication of the American memory” speaks directly to the “loss” of an idealized version of U.S. history, one in which “what’s important” is “why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant.” But his rendering of this eradication as both a symptom and cause of the “erosion of the American spirit” reminds us of Reagan’s broader preoccupation with the 1 Reagan, Ronald. "Farewell Address to the Nation." 11 Jan. 1989. <http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/ archives/speeches/1989/011189i.htm> 72 restoration of the “moral core” of the nation in the form of conservative family values, personal responsibility and the work ethic, and the social reproduction of those values. Reagan’s integration of these concepts into the project of economic neoliberalization became the means by which the radical shifts in labor practices and modes of life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries were excused: the vicissitudes of capitalism and the failures of the “free” market were displaced onto families and individuals enabling the justification of Reaganomics at the expense of the very idealized forms of life that Reagan so effectively popularized. Indeed, while Reagan linked familial prosperity to economic recovery in the form of, amongst other things, rising employment rates, his policies ultimately resulted in the increasing prevalence of part-time jobs and “jobless recoveries” in the U.S. Following the economic downturn of the early 1990s, a New York Times article on the state of employment during the economic recovery noted: Many good factory jobs and white-collar office jobs with good wages and benefits are giving way to unstable and mediocre jobs. That makes the recovery different from any other. Trends that started in the 1980s have produced a new look to working America. Part-time jobs, temporary jobs, jobs paying no more than the Federal minimum wages, jobs with no more benefits than a few vacation days are displacing permanent regular jobs that people would lose in past recessions and reclaim when business picked up. 2 The increasing number of what has variously been called contingent, flexible, assignment, disposable, or throwaway work was not a temporary problem but indicative of radical shifts in the economy as deindustrialization gave way to increased service sector and part-time employment. As Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio explain in 2 Kilborn, Peter. "Solid Jobs Seem to Vanish Despite Signs of Recovery," New York Times. 26 December 1992. Quoted in Aronowitz, Stanley, and William DiFazio. The Jobless Future, 2nd Edition. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. 1. 73 The Jobless Future, “most employment gains had been part-time jobs... In fact, if part- time employment was calculated as partial unemployment, if the military was excluded from the employed (as it had been until the Reagan Bureau of Labor Statistics revised the basis for computing the number of jobholders), and if discouraged workers—those who stopped looking for work—were factored into the jobless figure, the numbers would be much higher, closer to 12 percent.” 3 Technological change and outsourcing enabled the reduction of the American industrial workforce while corporate mergers and acquisitions resulted in plant closures and mass layoffs in the name of eliminating redundancy and overhead costs. And while many Americans continue to view the 1990s, particularly the period marking Bill Clinton’s presidency, as a time of economic prosperity, that prosperity was driven by “increased debt and increased job loss” which “were the real motor of the boom of the 1990s and 2000s,” as a growing number of “middle-class people took out second mortgages on their homes to pay for their ‘affluence’ in the absence of wage and salary increases... Conspicuous consumption financed with debt became the rage of the middle classes.” 4 Under these conditions, it shouldn’t surprise us that, as Reagan foretold, the 1990s often were and continue to be understood as a decade of increasing ambivalence and disenchantment. The optimism expressed by the “whatever” in Doc Brown’s parting words at the end of Back to the Future III—“The future is whatever you make it, so make it a good one!” and Marty’s reassurance that “We will!”—was quickly replaced by the ambivalent “whatever” of the Generation X slacker, whose “whatever” is no longer infused with optimistic possibility but resolves the difficulty of having to make a choice 3 Aronowitz and DiFazio 2. 4 Ibid 360. 74 or take action through indefinite deferral as found in the lyrics to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” or the indifferently flippant “whatever” of the valley girl, immortalized by actress Elisa Donovan’s Amber in the 1995 film Clueless. The OED offers that this use of “whatever” is “usually a response, suggesting the speaker’s reluctance to engage or argue, and hence often implying passive acceptance or tacit acquiescence; also used more pointedly to express indifference, indecision, impatience, scepticism, etc.” Figure 12. “What-EVER.” Clueless. Paramount Pictures, 1995. These characteristics, often attributed to Generation X, became a source of panic in the early 1990s as young adults entering their “prime working years” emerged out of relative obscurity to become a national sensation. In 1990, TIME magazine published an issue about this yet-to-be-named generation called twentysomething. The cover of this issue featured a group of five adults of various ethnicities with a caption reading: “Laid back, late blooming or just lost? Overshadowed by the baby boomers, America’s next generation has a hard act to follow.” While the cover story for this issue, “Living: Proceeding with Caution,” begins with a rather stereotypical description of indecisive and 75 unambitious youths who “possess only a hazy sense of their own identity” and a “monumental preoccupation with all the problems the preceding generation will leave for them to fix,” its writers quickly descend into the construction of a crisis of capitalism and the reproduction of labor. Citing the decline in the U.S. birthrate to “half the level of its postwar peak” during the period in which these young adults were born (resulting in the label “baby busters”), the authors suggest that this scarcity “could result in severe labor shortages in the coming decade.” 5 This impending labor shortage (no mention is made of a work shortage) prompts the writers to provide brief explanations of how employers can appeal to this generation in their recruitment efforts. Discussing twentysomethings’ desire for “flexibility, access to decision making and a return to the sacredness of work- free weekends,” their desire for “constant feedback” and positive reinforcement from supervisors, and the central importance of job gratification, the TIME article slips in and out of the rhetoric used by management gurus who would, throughout the 90s, clamor to understand this generation and most effectively put them to work. 6 Anticipating the explosion of interest on the part of marketing firms and management consultants that would begin in earnest in the 1990s and continue into the present, Douglas Coupland—whose 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture would popularize the Gen X label—wrote a tongue-in-cheek article on this 5 Gross and Scott, "Living: Proceeding with Caution." 6 For example, see Tulgan, Bruce. Managing Generation X: How to bring out the best in young talent. New York & London: Norton, 1996; Cantieri, Catherine. "Managing Generations: Generation X." Reliance Staffing & Recruiting. 11 Aug. 2011. < http://reliancestaffing.com/2011/08/managing-generations- generation-x/>; Raines, Claire. "Generation X Managing Generation X." Generations at Work: The Online Home of Claire Raines Associates, Leaders in Generations Training. 1997. < http://www.generationsat work.com/articles_genx.php>; Giang, Vivian. "Here Are The Strengths And Weaknesses of Millenials, Gen X, And Boomers." Business Insider. 9 Sept. 2013. < http://www.businessinsider.com/how-millennials- gen-x-and-boomers-shape-the-workplace-2013-9>; "Younger managers rise in the ranks: EY study on generational shifts in the US workplace." Ernst & Young Global Limited. 3 Sept. 2013. <http://www.ey. com/US/en/Issues/Talent-management/Talent-Survey-The-generational-management-shift>. 76 generation for the Canadian magazine Vista in 1989. 7 Introducing “Generation X” is a caption that reads: “They were raised on Pop-Tarts, swimming pools and boundless promise. They want everything—and deserve room to go for it. To get the best from them, follow this guide to care and leading.” 8 Featuring a comic illustrated by Paul Rivoche, which follows a day in the working life of Brad X at Excess Marketing, Inc., Coupland begins the article with a brief profile of Don, a twenty-six year old with a business degree who has just returned home to live with his parents after leaving his job in Tokyo: Don, like so many people I know in their twenties, can do anything he wants, but instead he is doing nothing. Or, rather, he is doing many things, but there is no seeming pattern and he has no long-range plan in mind. His biggest fear in life, like that of British aristocrats in Evelyn Waugh novels, is boredom. ...Numbering around 20 million in North America, people like Don are now entering the work force in bulk, carrying with them a set of inflexible attitudes that challenge traditional views of an employee’s role. For people hiring them, or working with them, they present new challenges. But they can also be tremendous resources, as long as they are managed and integrated into office life in ways that best exploit their considerable talents. 9 In contrast to the straight-laced profile of twentysomethings featured in TIME magazine—whose interviewees consist largely of privileged and oftentimes overachieving Xers like “Jennifer Peters, 22, one of the youngest candidates ever to be admitted to the State Bar of California,” and a plethora of baby boomers in senior positions at ad agencies and collegiate and demographics magazines, one of whom refers to the “twentysomething generation” as “the New Petulants”—Coupland’s article ironically assumes the perspective of baby boomers and yuppies who look upon their 7 Coupland's first Generation X related publication was for the September 1987 Vancouver magazine. 8 Coupland, Douglas. "Generation X." Vista (1989): 81. 9 Ibid 83. 77 successors with disdain, portraying “Xs” as over-privileged extended adolescents with over-inflated senses of entitlement who possess impossibly high expectations and are adamantly inflexible. Figure 13. “Generation X.” Illustrated by Paul Rivoche. Vista, 1989. Coupland’s ironically biting tone remains consistent throughout the piece, offering moments of insight into the shifting expectations and changing attitudes of this generation: What ultimately happened as Generation X kids grew up? The brilliant world of opportunity promised by their parents, educations and sheltered upbringings never arrived for them. Instead came the highly competitive, bland and corporate 1980s. The personal development and self-absorption that Xs had come to cherish was no longer modish, nor were the “soft” liberal arts degrees touted by their parents. An age of diminishing expectations arrived for a generation totally prepared for the opposite. The result? A group of people who feel no job is ever creative or flexible enough to fulfill their sense of entitlement; young adults who have trouble growing up and leaving the security of their parents homes; a generation profoundly disenchanted with society, that feels unable to effect change and that registers this sentiment by nonparticipation—by forever remaining on the fringe. 10 As the economic optimism of the Reagan era ultimately failed to deliver, giving way to the stock market crash of 1987 and the 1990-1993 Bush Recession, and as real wages 10 Ibid 81. 78 remained stagnant throughout the Reagan presidency, witnessing only a slight increase during the Clinton era and declining again for the majority of wage earners in the U.S. into the present, the “brilliant world of opportunity promised” by their parents and their political leaders not only “never arrived” but left some members of Generation X disenchanted. While this disenchantment is paired with an over-privileged sense of entitlement in Coupland’s article, his pairing of “an age of diminishing expectations” wrought by neoliberal capitalism’s radical transformations of the job market and economy as a whole with a list of this generation’s “shortcomings,” like much of the critique in the piece, is laced with a bitter irony. Echoing the disappointment expressed in Coupland’s rendering of “the brilliant world of opportunity” ultimately turning out to be “an age of diminishing expectations,” Geoffrey T. Holtz explains in Welcome to the Jungle: The Why Behind “Generation X,” that much of the angst and disenchantment felt by Gen Xers stemmed from the promise that “the future is whatever you make it” and a lived reality in which “making it a good one” seemed increasingly difficult if not impossible for all but a privileged few: “Higher education is being priced out of reach for a growing number. Job and income prospects are dismal. And the dream of owning a home is slipping away from all but a dwindling few. The chances that we’ll surpass our parents’ standard of living are minimal.” 11 Focusing primarily on Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X, this chapter explores the ways in which the novel expresses and perhaps even complicates Paolo Virno’s articulation of “the sentiments of disenchantment,” “from which may arise both cheerful resignation, inexhaustible renunciation, and social assimilation on the one hand 11 Holtz, Geoffrey T. Welcome to the Jungle: The Why Behind "Generation X." New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1995. 5. 79 and new demands for the radical transformation of the status quo on the other.” 12 In tracking the disenchantment with labor and consumer culture in the U.S. felt by those whom Coupland describes as registering “this sentiment by nonparticipation—by forever remaining on the fringe,” we will find that rather than resulting in or even longing for a “radical transformation of the status quo,” the defection of Generation X’s slackers from the conditions that inform their disenchantment involves an engagement with what Stuart Hall calls “the politics of withdrawal,” an every day politics that is “primarily adaptive” to the “established system of values” rather than a revolutionary and radical movement against it. 13 Although concerns regarding “authenticity” inform the desires, motivations, and actions of the three central characters of Generation X, they are ultimately ambivalent, reflecting what Sarah Banet-Weiser calls “the ambivalence of brand culture,” “where both economic imperatives and ‘authenticity’ are expressed and experienced simultaneously.” 14 In a decade that became obsessed with ideas regarding the “alternative” and “mainstream,” and mirrored in that binary the “authentic” and “inauthentic,” capitalism’s appropriation of particular desires and the ambivalence regarding both one’s participation in and resistance to normative forms of labor and modes of life in the U.S. also reveals the ways in which the transformation of work under neoliberal capitalism, primarily in the form of “creative” labor, witnessed the blurring of lines between “the time given over to work and that dedicated to what is called life.” 15 12 Virno, Paolo. "The Ambivalence of Disenchantment." Trans. Michael Turits. Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics. Eds. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 13. 13 Hall, Stuart. "The Hippies: an American 'moment'." CCCS Selected Working Papers, Vol. 2. Eds. Ann Gray, Jan Campbell, Mark Erickson, Stuart Hanson and Helen Wood. New York: Routledge, 2007. 147. 14 Banet-Weiser, Sarah. Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture. New York & London: New York University Press, 2012. 5. 15 Virno 13. 80 The Ambivalence of Disenchantment and the Politics of Withdrawal Disenchantment among American workers with the drudgery of their jobs has been growing since at least the 1970s. As Work in America, a 1973 report published by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare concluded, “a significant number of Americans are dissatisfied with the quality of their working lives. Dull, repetitive, seemingly meaningless tasks, offering little challenge or autonomy, are causing discontent among workers at all occupational levels.” 16 Ranging from the “alienation and disenchantment of blue-collar workers” to “the disgruntlement of white-collar workers,” the findings of the report were echoed in the “hardly concealed discontent” recorded by Studs Terkel in his 1974 book Working: “The blue-collar blues is no more bitterly sung than the white-collar moan. ‘I’m a machine,’ says the spot-welder. ‘I’m caged,’ says the bank teller, and echoes the hotel clerk. ‘I’m a mule,’ says the steelworker. ‘A monkey can do what I do,’ says the receptionist... Blue collar and white call upon the identical phrase: ‘I’m a robot.’” 17 Amidst the increasingly “automated pace of [their] daily jobs” a felt sense of the dehumanizing mechanization of labor, expressed in the phrase “I’m a robot,” produced a widespread disenchantment among the American workforce resulting in the questioning of the work ethic and shows of discontent in the form of absenteeism and slovenly work. 18 These sentiments became vocalized with increasing frequency in the novels and films of the 1990s. The publication of Coupland’s Generation X and the release of Richard Linklater’s Slacker in 1991 quickly led to an increased interest in 16 Work in America, Report of a Special Task Force to the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973. Quoted in Ross, Andrew. No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003. 6. 17 Terkel, Studs. Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. New York: The New Press, 2004. xi-xii. 18 Ibid xii. 81 depicting the disenchantment with work among a broad range of Gen Xers. From the disgruntled, disinterested, and slovenly employees of convenience and video rental stores in Kevin Smith’s Clerks (1994) to the Bartleby-esque anti-hero of Mike Judge’s hilarious critique of corporate culture in Office Space (1999), 90s popular culture often depicted absenteeism and slovenliness resulting from disenchantment as normalized gestures that were part of a daily work routine rather than as forms of protest against the exploitative conditions of work. Douglas Coupland’s Generation X gives voice to the disenchantment of its characters through descriptions of the physically toxic and emotionally numbing effects of their employment prior to arriving in Palm Springs, California. In the narrator’s retelling of the slacker origin story of one of the novel’s central characters, Dagmar Bellinghausen, we are given a detailed account of his last day at work for a marketing firm in Toronto, Canada, where his office is afflicted with “Sick Building Syndrome”: “The windows in the office building where I worked didn’t open that morning, and I was sitting in my cubicle, affectionately named the veal-fattening pen. I was getting sicker and more headachy by the minute as the airborne stew of office toxins and viruses recirculated—around and around—in the fans.” 19 Reminiscent of Don DeLillo’s “airborne toxic event,” “these poison winds were eddying in my area in particular, aided by the hum of the white noise machine and the glow of the [sperm-dissolving] VDT screens.” 20 Dag’s suspicions regarding the toxicity of his workplace are shared by Karen, who “was spooked about the Sick Building business more than any of us. She had a sister, who worked as an X-ray technician in Montreal, give her a lead apron, which she 19 Coupland, Generation X (1991), 19. 20 Ibid. 82 wore to protect her ovaries when she was doing her keyboarding work,” and others who share his space in the “junior stockyard.” 21 In contrast to the “no-future” McJobs that Dag and his slacker cohort eventually pursue, the characters’ association of the corporate workplace with sterility and infertility suggests a break from the production-reproduction cycles of labor. But the possibility of leaving the environment and the very activity of work, which threatens their reproductive capacities, is rendered largely moot. Even Karen, who protects her ever degrading ovaries with a lead apron, can only imagine freedom in the form of temp work. 22 His cynicism deepening, Dag begins to question the value of work: You really have to wonder why we even bother to get up in the morning. I mean, really: Why work? Simply to buy more stuff? That’s just not enough. Look at us all. What’s the common assumption that got us all from there to here? What makes us deserve the ice cream and running shoes and wool Italian suits we have? I mean, I see all of us trying so hard to acquire so much stuff, but I can’t help but feeling that we didn’t merit it, that… 23 Cutting him off before he goes “into one of [his] Exercised Young Man states,” his coworker Margaret responds with an equally cynical observation masked in the language of realism, telling Dag that “the only reason we all go to work in the morning is because we’re terrified of what would happen if we stopped. ‘We’re not built for free time as a species. We think we are, but we aren’t.’” 24 Published a year before P.D. James’ Children of Men, Dag’s story in Generation X provides us with a rather intriguing point of speculation for the cause of infertility in James’ dystopian novel (which traces the origins of infertility to the plummeting of men’s sperm counts in 1994) of reproductive futurity’s 21 Ibid 20. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid 23. 24 Ibid. 83 potential end. In the film adaptation’s opening moments, we are given glimpses into a hopeless world in which infertility equates to the inevitability of human extinction, but “Britain Soldiers On” while the rest of the world crumbles, in part, by continuing to go to work. Mark Fisher reads this aspect of Children of Men as reflecting the postmodern dictum “that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” 25 Here, Margaret’s assertion that “the only reason we all go to work in the morning is because we’re terrified of what would happen if we stopped” reflects what Fisher calls capitalist realism: “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” 26 While the workplace is imagined as a threat to biological reproductivity, Generation X also explores the social and economic components of middle-class reproductive logics. Summoned into his yuppie, pony-tailed boss Martin’s office for calling a public health inspector, Dag is criticized for his dissatisfaction: “I just don’t understand you young people. No workplace is ever okay enough. And you mope and complain about how uncreative your jobs are and how you’re getting nowhere.” 27 In response, Dag launches into a rant attacking Martin’s ignorance, which he directly ties to his status as a baby boomer, asking, “do you really think we enjoy hearing about your brand new million-dollar home when we can barely afford to eat Kraft Dinner sandwiches in our grimy little shoe boxes and we’re pushing thirty?” 28 Suggesting the impossibility of attaining the normative “good life” that jobs like his might once have 25 Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester, UK & Washington, US: Zero Books, 2009. 2. 26 Ibid. 27 Coupland 19. 28 Ibid 21. 84 promised, the juxtaposition of Dag’s rant with his description of “sick building syndrome” suggests not only that the world of corporate work is no longer able to fulfill the promise of upward mobility and middle-class normativity in an era of stagnant wages and housing-price inflation, but that it represents a potentially greater threat to normative futurity than the downwardly mobile, “dead-end, no-future” lives pursued by the novel’s main characters. Ending his rant, Dag concludes, “You really make me sick,” connecting Martin’s existence, his presence in the workplace, to the environmental catastrophe that looms over the office. Dag and Martin’s argument is interrupted by a phone call from a higher-up that Martin is desperately seeking approval from, and as Dag slips out of the office and into the staff cafeteria, he sees further signs of environmental decay. Watching as a salesman pours “scalding hot coffee into the soil around a ficus tree which really hadn’t even recovered yet from having been fed cocktails and cigarette butts from the Christmas party,” Dag grows increasingly cynical. As he listens to the idle chatter of the staff, who “were all bitching about commuting time and making AIDS jokes, labeling the office’s fashion victims, sneezing, discussing their horoscopes, planning their time-shares in Santo Domingo, and slagging the rich and famous,” the cafeteria turns into a reflection of his own cynicism and disenchantment: “the room matched my mood.” 29 Leaving his job, Dag has what the novel’s marginalia calls a “Mid-Twenties Breakdown: A period of mental collapse occurring in one’s twenties, often caused by an inability to function outside of school or structured environments coupled with a realization of one’s essential aloneness in the world.” 30 Dag’s breakdown is informed, in 29 Ibid 21-22. 30 Ibid 27. 85 part, by his inability to imagine, let alone find, an alternative, an inability that is later voiced by Andy’s younger brother Tyler, a “global teen” who, like pre-breakdown Dag, enjoys a largely unconflicted relationship to consumerism: “I know—it looks as if I enjoy what’s going on with my life and everything, but listen, my heart’s only half in it. You give my friends and me a bum rap but I’d give all of this up in a flash if someone had an even remotely plausible alternative.” 31 After leaving his corporate job, Dag spends a brief period of time as an interloper among the bohemian “Basement People” of Toronto. Assimilating into bohemian culture, Dag stopped cutting my hair. I began drinking too many little baby coffees as strong as heroin in small cafés where sixteen-year-old boys and girls with nose rings daily invented new salad dressing by selecting spices with the most exotic names (‘Oooooh! Cardamom! Let’s try a teaspoon of that!”) I developed new friends who yapped endlessly about South American novelists never getting enough attention. I ate lentils. I wore llama motif serapes, smoked brave little cigarettes (Nazionali’s, from Italy, I remember). In short, I was earnest. Basement subculture was strictly codified: wardrobes consisted of tie-dyed and faded T-shirts bearing images of Schopenhauer or Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, all accessorized with Rasta doohickeys and badges. 32 But Dag never feels entirely earnest, admitting that “my life-style escape wasn’t working. I was only using the real Basement People to my own ends—no different than the way design people exploit artists for new design riffs. I was an imposter.” 33 While Dag believes himself to be an interloper among the “real” bohemians, his description of the strictly codified subculture reflects the commodification of the “alternative” and its appropriation of marginalized cultural and political symbols, in ways mirroring his own observations about marketing: “It’s not creation, really, but theft, and no one ever feels 31 Ibid 150. 32 Ibid 26. 33 Ibid 27. 86 good about stealing.” 34 Unable to escape from his cynicism, overwhelmed by both the omnipresence of capitalism and its consumer cultures and the seeming lack of alternatives in a world where the alternative has become yet another marketing ploy, Dag arrives at a point “when things got pharmaceutical, when they hit bottom, and when all voices of comfort began to fail.” 35 Moving in with his brother, who is frequently away on business, in Buffalo, New York, “a city which I once read had been labeled North America’s first ‘ghost’ city since a sizable chunk of its core businesses had just up and left one fine 1970s day,” Dag spends most of his time sitting by himself “in the middle of his [brother’s] living room floor with stacks of pornography and bottles of Blue Sapphire gin and the stereo going full blast,” thinking to himself, “Hey! I’m having a party!” 36 Dag’s cynicism towards the toxic sociality of the corporate workplace and his feelings of inauthenticity amidst bohemians, who like him, express their “alterity” through consumption, results in anti- social withdrawal: “I started to find humanity repulsive, reducing it to hormones, flanks, mounds, secretions, and compelling methanous stinks.” 37 On a “depressive’s diet” of “downers and antidepressants... to fight my black thoughts,” “convinced that all of the people I’d ever gone to school with were headed for great things in life and that I wasn’t. They were having more fun; finding more meaning in life,” Dag sees himself reflected in the “abandoned mini-malls, flour mills, and oil refineries of Tonawanda and Niagara Falls”—site of the 1970s Love Canal environmental disaster—the economic ruin and 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid 29. 37 Ibid 30. 87 industrial decay of Western New York in the last decades of the 20th century serving as material signifiers of his disenchantment. 38 Dag’s disenchantment extends beyond the world of corporate work to the realm of every day life, gesturing towards what Paolo Virno, in his discussion of the “sentiments of disenchantment” in a post-Fordist, post-Taylorist society in “The Ambivalence of Disenchantment,” refers to as the “emotional situation... those modes of being and feeling so pervasive as to be common to the most diverse contexts of experience, both the time given over to work and that dedicated to what is called life.” 39 The sentiments of disenchantment—opportunism, cynicism, and fear—represent the late capitalist incorporation of feelings of alienation and disenchantment, which in traditional renderings of Marxist class struggle carried the potential for revolution, into neoliberal labor practices. As Virno puts it, these sentiments “enter into production.” 40 The increasing technologization of labor, the radical shift from stable to contingent and temporary forms of employment, the loss of benefits and pensions, and the stagnation of wages result not in some inevitable demand for radical change but the adaptability, flexibility, and mobility of the contemporary worker: “habituation to uninterrupted and nonteleological change, reflexes tested by a chain of perceptive shocks, a strong sense of the contingent and the aleatory, a nondeterministic mentality, urban training in traversing the crossroads of differing opportunities. These are the qualities that have been elevated to an authentic productive force.” 41 Processes of socialization previously thought to be independent of production, “outside the initiatory rituals of the factory and the office” are 38 Ibid. 39 Virno 13. 40 Ibid 14. 41 Ibid 15. 88 subsumed into the productive process, blurring the lines between “work” and “life” (previously defined as the time spent away from but enabled by work). 42 Initiated by his disenchantment with work, Dag observes that the crisis of his mid-twenties breakdown “wasn’t just the failure of youth but also a failure of class and sex and the future and I still don’t know what.” 43 His disenchantment registers as a perverse cynicism, as he “began to see this world as one where citizens stare, say, at the armless Venus de Milo and fantasize about amputee sex or self-righteously apply a fig leaf to the statue of David, but not before breaking off his dick as a souvenir.” 44 He becomes “convinced that I would walk around the next forty years hollowly acting out life’s motions,” suggesting that life, as dictated by normative desires and conventions, has been reduced to a series of empty gestures in which satisfaction is derived from the accomplishment of a set of generic, dictated goals that constitute “life” as such. 45 In a society in which the realms of feeling and experience have been subsumed into the productive process both in the workplace itself and outside of it, in which forms of social and cultural identity such as class no longer provide a stable sense of community, unity is found not in relations to production but in the shared experience of the emotional situation under late capitalism. This prompts Virno to ask: “So what unites the software technician, the autoworker at Fiat, and the illegal laborer? ...nothing unites them any longer with respect to the form and content of the productive process. But also: everything unites them regarding the form and content of socialization. What is common are their emotional tonalities, their inclinations, their mentalities, and their 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid 30. 44 Ibid 31-32. 45 Ibid 30. 89 expectations.” 46 Opportunism, cynicism, and fear become the emotional norms in an unstable context that elicits feelings of vulnerability to constant change and unlimited insecurity, becoming valuable, sought-after qualities in an increasingly precarious and competitive labor market. On the one hand, “opportunism, cynicism, and fear define a contemporary emotional situation marked precisely by an abandonment to finitude and a belonging to uprooting, by resignation, servitude, and eager acquiescence,” but Virno sees potential in even these bleak circumstances: “At the same time, they make that situation visible as an irreversible fact on whose basis conflict and revolt might also be conceived.” 47 Rather than resigning himself to act out life’s motions for the next forty years, acquiescing to the inevitability and seemingly omnipresent sociality dictated by the processes of neoliberal production and socialization, Dag decides to “drop out even further,” not through a further retreat into the antisocial, but through an effort to forge an identity and sense of belonging that breaks from the overdetermined forms of “belonging- to-which” dictated by capitalism but never completely outside of it. In “The Hippies: an American ‘moment’,” Stuart Hall provides a useful method for understanding Generation X slackers through his examination of the largely white, middle-class, and college-educated hippy subculture of the 1960s, allowing for a critical, yet nonetheless optimistic, rendering of an everyday politics that in the assumption of deviance from normative life reveals and contributes “to the growth of political contestation with the system.” 48 Hall’s explication of “dropping out,” for instance, directly parallel’s Dag’s own iteration of “drop out” in Generation X: “’Drop out’... 46 Ibid 19. 47 Ibid 33. 48 Hall, Stuart. "The Hippies: an American 'moment'." CCCS Selected Working Papers, Vol 2. Eds. Ann Gray, Jan Campbell, Mark Erickson, Stuart Hanson and Helen Wood. London & New York: Routledge, 2007. 161. 90 means, literally, that the Hippie should reject the structures of middle class experience, the way of life oriented towards work, power, status, consumption—goals which have been discredited within the counter-value system of Hippie sub-culture. The Hippie is a ‘drop out’ from the system for which family, education and socialisation have been grooming him: he actively ‘opts in’ to the ‘deviant’ round of life.” 49 As Coupland observed in his 1989 article on Generation X, “The brilliant world of opportunity promised by their parents, educations and sheltered upbringings never arrived for them... The personal development and self-absorption that Xs had come to cherish was no longer modish, nor were the ‘soft’ liberal arts degrees touted by their parents.” Not only does the Generation X slacker drop out of the system for which he has been groomed, that system itself is exposed as a fantasy that will never manifest. But dropping out is rarely, if ever, a fully realized rejection and defection from the system against which it defines itself. Dag, Claire Baxter, and Andrew Palmer move to Palm Springs, California, the desert resort city which Andy describes as “undoubtedly a quiet sanctuary from the bulk of middle-class life,” a city where “there is... no middle class,” suggesting that their defection is not from a broadly conceived and omnipresent capitalism, but from a specific class-based relation to it, a relation they see as already crumbling under the weight of present economic conditions. Rather than open confrontation and more visible forms of struggle against a system they see as oppressive and dehumanizing, they choose defection and exodus. Moving “away from the dominant rules that determine individual roles and precise identities, and that surreptitiously configure the ‘to which’ of belonging,” marked, for example, by contemporary understandings of identity that cling to employment or middle-class models of aspiration 49 Ibid 148. 91 and “the good life,” the characters attempt to create for themselves “a realm of experience felt to be their own, a ‘custom’ that [has] no other foundation than the experience in which it [is] forged.” 50 For Hall, “non-recognition and counter-definitions of social norms... can lead to forms of personal protest and rebellion, withdrawal, which, though counter-posed to the established system of values, are primarily adaptive to that system: every society has its tolerated areas of deviance, its sanctioned rebels and eccentrics, its licensed fools.” 51 The notion of “tolerated areas of deviance” certainly speaks to the slacker’s reliance upon and occasional engagement with a variety of privileges. White, largely though not exclusively male, and middle-class privilege, the novel occasionally suggests, are what allow for Claire, Andy, and Dag’s departure from “the bulk of middle-class life.” As terms such as safety net-ism, “the belief that there will always be a financial and emotional safety net to buffer life’s hurts. Usually parents,” indicate, parental support is often available in lieu of personal failure, a point that is driven home by Andy’s mother. During a trip home for Christmas, she observes that “the moment one of you kids phones up and gets nostalgic for the past or starts talking about how poorly a job is going, I know it’s time to put out the fresh linen.” 52 In addition, the characters’ choice “not to participate” in the career-driven worlds from which they have defected (seeking solace in their chosen McJobs) suggests that their departure from the middle-class is supported by its concomitant privileges. As Paul Willis notes in his examination of working class “lads” in Learning to Labour, “work as a 50 Ibid. 51 Hall 147. 52 Coupland 138. 92 matter of particular job choice... is, in essence, a very middle class construct.” 53 On the one hand, this notion of job choice as a middle class privilege enables us to understand the Generation X slacker’s ability to choose to pursue their dead end jobs or to choose nothing at all, exemplified in “option paralysis: the tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none.” 54 However, it is equally important to make note of the new labor- market regime of neoliberal capitalism and its effects on both the working and middle- classes in order to discern in these changes the diminishing privileges commonly associated with middle-class life in earlier times of economic prosperity and job stability. 55 Andrew Ross explains: Today’s livelihoods are pursued on economic ground that shifts rapidly underfoot, and many of our old assumptions about how people can make a living are outdated pieties. No one, not even those in the traditional professions, can any longer expect a fixed pattern of employment in the course of their lifetime, and they are under more and more pressure to anticipate, and prepare for, a future in which they still will be able to compete in a changing marketplace. The rise in the percentage of contingent employment, both in low-end service sectors and in high-wage occupations, has been steady and shows no sign of leveling off. 56 While Andy’s mother’s observations regarding his siblings reveals their dependence on mom and dad to “buffer life’s hurts,” Andy himself seems to want to have nothing to do with this arrangement and decides “it’s time to move on.” 57 “Time to escape,” Andy remarks just before leaving his brief Christmas visit with family in Portland, Oregon. “I want my real life back with all of its funny smells, pockets of loneliness, and long, clear 53 Willis, Learning to labour, 99. 54 Coupland 139. 55 See Aronowitz and DiFazio, The Jobless Future; Learning to Labor in New Times. Eds. Nadine Dolby and Greg Dimitriadis with Paul Willis. New York & London: Routledge Falmer, 2004. 56 Ross, Andrew. Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times. New York & London: New York University Press, 2009. 1-2. 57 Coupland 144. 93 car rides. I want my friends and my dopey job dispensing cocktails to leftovers.” 58 Rather than a temporary escape from family, only to return home for Christmas the following year, Andy’s decision to “move on” is imbued with a sense of permanence. Engaging in what Hall refers to as “a tactical withdrawal,” Andy’s desire to return to “real life,” to his friends and his job, is indicative of his investment in the life he and Claire and Dag have forged together. In their inversion of “the existing moral order of things” the characters of Generation X do not create a “new value system” but contest the normative order of things: “value systems are never changed or replaced until they have been contested, until someone somewhere has tried to live their alternatives.” 59 In Generation X the “alternative” is not a drastic departure from capitalism and consumer culture writ-large, but a departure from the dominant logics of middle-class society. While the hippies engaged in symbolic forms of identification with rejected social groups through the assumption of poverty and the appropriation of Native American styles and rituals, the characters in Generation X ultimately only identify with one another, gesturing toward the alienation not only of the laborer from the product of his labor but social alienation. Hall ultimately sees the hippies as attempting to “prefigure a new kind of subjectivity,” one that anticipates a revolutionary transformation that “gives that subjectivity a societal context.” 60 But in his overall rendering of the hippy subculture as adaptive and engaged in tactical withdrawal from the normative, middle- class system, Hall reveals an ambivalence between a reactive disengagement that is symptomatic of “society’s dominant normative order,” exposing “its own inner stresses, contradictions and conflicts which are now being openly and vigorously expressed,” and 58 Ibid 149. 59 Ibid 162. 60 Ibid 163. 94 a utopianism that informs their anticipatory attempts to “sketch out a model of future possibilities.” 61 In this case, it is important to understand the Gen X slackers of Coupland’s novel as both symptomatic of the systems from which they have withdrawn and as giving expression to a desire for different forms of being in and relating to the world. For Virno, such “lines of flight” enable the delineation of realms of experience that break from capitalist normativity, providing a starting point or “degree zero” from which a radical transformation of the status quo might be conceived and forged, but whose actualization does not constitute a mandatory condition for its viability as a political potentiality or mechanism for survival in the present. Rather than presenting their exodus to Palm Springs as an outright rejection of the status quo, Generation X reveals the complexities inherent in the ambivalence of disenchantment. Ambivalence is rendered as a conflicted and sometimes contradictory mode of being and feeling experienced by the characters which pits necessity against romanticized desires for escape and authenticity. This ambivalence extends to the novel’s style and format as well, as Coupland’s largely sympathetic rendering of Andy, Dag, and Claire’s narrative is paired with slogans critical of consumer culture that simultaneously appropriate the language of marketing and advertising, Pop Art comic panels, and various “terms” that regularly offer cynical definitions of the primary narrative’s more earnest behaviors and desires. For Mark Forshaw, this marginalia often “ironically undermines the otherwise largely direct and occasionally lyrical tone of Coupland’s narrative.” 62 In his view, irony regularly subverts Andy’s efforts to imbue “the challenging choices made and enacted by his friends as atypically brave, heroically individual,” by means of this 61 Hall 147; 163. 62 Forshaw, Mark. "Douglas Coupland: In and Out of 'Ironic Hell'." Critical Survey, Vol. 12, No. 3 (2000): 42. 95 “second stratum of text,” becoming a “key problem in Coupland’s first novel.” 63 But if we consider the significance of ambivalence not only to the characters’ relationships to capitalist consumer culture, an ambivalence that often registers as irony itself, but also to the novel’s relationship to the characters themselves, it is possible to see that this regular disruption of lauded (American) romantic ideals such as heroic individualism is, perhaps, precisely the point. Rather than a “failure of a relation, the opposite of happiness,” as Lauren Berlant puts it, ambivalence is rendered in the novel “as an intimate attachment and a pleasure in its own right.” 64 At the start of the novel, Andy narrates an experience from his past that enables him to communicate the particular character of his ambivalence in the present. At the age of fifteen, he spends his life savings on a plane ticket from Portland, Oregon to Brandon, Manitoba “to witness a total eclipse of the sun.” Upon his arrival “deep in the Canadian prairies,” he lays down in a field and watches as darkness fills the sky and the sun is blotted out. In this moment he experiences “a mood that I have never really been able to shake completely—a mood of darkness and inevitability and fascination.” 65 Fifteen years later, sitting on the “the front lanai of [his] rented bungalow in Palm Springs, California,” awaiting the sunrise over the San Andreas fault, Andy notes that his “feelings are just as ambivalent” as he picks “pale yellow cottage cheesy guck” from his dogs’ snouts, suspecting that they “have been rummaging through the dumpsters out behind the cosmetic surgery center again, and their snouts are accessorized with... yuppie liposuction fat.” 66 Contrasting the romanticism of his childhood experience with the revolting 63 Ibid 41-43. 64 Berlant, The Female Complaint, 2. 65 Ibid 3. 66 Ibid 4. 96 banality of the liposuctioned present, Andy’s ambivalence, registering here almost as indifference, enables us to understand that defection and exodus are, in the present, often incomplete movements away from the capitalist status quo. As Andy makes clear in his Gen X declaration of independence: “We live small lives on the periphery; we are marginalized and there’s a great deal in which we choose not to participate... But now that we live here in the desert, things are much, much better.” Participation and the characters’ Bartleby-ian preference “not to” provides us with the specific articulation of their defection. In Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture, and the Contemporary American Novel, James Annesley argues that these opening moments from the novel reveal the “significant tensions between the illusion of transcendence” in Andy’s account of the Manitoba eclipse and the “inescapable material realities” represented by the yuppie liposuction fat he plucks from his dogs’ snouts. 67 Identifying this tension as the source of Generation X’s “paradoxical anti-materialism” and its narrative’s inability “to recognise the commercialised nature of the types of sensations it celebrates,” Annesley reads “the commodified decadence described in Generation X” as a “potent image of the intensively commercialised culture that has been identified as one of the defining features of late capitalism.” 68 For Annesley, the novel is a symptom of late capitalism’s encroachment on literary style and genre rather than an exploration of it, erasing the significance of ambivalence as the “mood” that ushers us into its narrative present. In this view, the novel and its characters aren’t ambivalent, just ignorant: “Unable to recognise the commercialised nature of the types of sensations it celebrates, the novel develops a 67 Annesley, James. Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture, and the Contemporary American Novel. London: Pluto Press, 1998. 122. 68 Ibid 126. 97 sensibility that seems to be strikingly at odds with the kind of environment in which this sensibility is supposed to operate.” 69 In stating that there is a specific type of environment in which this sensibility is supposed to operate, Annesley imagines some more authentic and therefore more appropriate site for the performance of what he assumes is the “overwhelming antagonism towards the commercialism of contemporary American culture” at the novel’s core, a commercialism that he homogenizes and simplifies in order to assert the text’s “rigorously anti-materialistic ethic.” 70 Annesley’s rendering of “anti-materialism” seems to demand a rigorous asceticism as the necessary condition for its authentic expression. Yet the desire for “epiphanic” transcendence he attributes to the characters of Generation X is dependent upon his assumption of their withdrawal from “the alienating materialism of the modern world” and into “a space untouched by its seemingly degrading influence.” Though such forms of withdrawal inform an inconsistent and fleeting desire occasionally expressed by the novel’s slackers, these moments are always accompanied by the realization that they are not beyond capitalism’s influence. Instead of seeing themselves as seeking life outside of or beyond capitalism and consumer culture, they actively live on its fringes, to recall Coupland’s 1989 article, or, as Generation X’s characters describe it, occupy its margins. As Andrew Tate writes, “The novel’s trinity of principal characters displays a visceral dislike of the grasping, aggressive career-driven worlds that they have abandoned but neither are they committed anti-capitalist agitators.” 71 Although Annesley is correct in suggesting that Andy’s statement that “now that we live here in the desert, 69 Ibid 122. 70 Annesley 121-122. 71 Tate, Andrew. Douglas Coupland. Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 2007. 5. Emphasis mine. 98 things are much, much better” indicates the characters’ desire to “escape from the mundanity and meaninglessness of clerical employment and the numbing impact of consumerism,” his insistence that “The desert... takes on a romantic significance and becomes, in their imaginations, a place set apart from the degrading commercial pressures of everyday experience” are thwarted by his own observations of Coupland’s use of imagery that merges the natural and the artificial (“artificiality” standing in for the “inauthentic,” for Annesley) throughout the novel. In his attempt to read Palm Springs as a “pastoral environment” that provides the characters with a reprieve from the economic imperatives of late capitalism, Annesley’s overinvestment in the novel’s anti-materialist ethos results in his failure to account for the novel’s actual rendering of Palm Springs as an inevitable point of return for capital in a consumer society. 72 As Dag observes, “every time someone on the planet uses a paper clip, fabric softens their laundry, or watches a rerun of ‘Hee Haw’ on TV, a resident somewhere here in the Coachella Valley collects a penny.” 73 Far from representing some pastoral ideal in the escapist imaginaries of the novel’s characters, Palm Springs is representative of the excesses of capitalism and bourgeois decadence Annesley insistently attributes to the novel’s slacker characters. Looking out upon the “tens of thousands of turbo blades set on poles and aimed at Mount San Gorgonio,” Andy explains that the windmills that greet visitors and residents alike to the city were “Conceived of as a tax dodge after the oil shock... Curiously, they turned out to be functional as well as a good tax dodge, and the volts they silently generate power detox center air conditioners and 72 Annesley 121. 73 Coupland 10. 99 cellulite vacuums of the region’s burgeoning cosmetic surgery industry.” 74 As a resort city that serves as the retirement residence or vacation getaway for California’s more affluent upper-middle and upper classes and the permanent residence of the working and under-classes that maintain their perfectly manicured lawns and service them at day spas, Palm Springs serves as both a reminder of the relationship between work and leisure as well as the work engaged in by one class to provide the leisure of another. Contrasting the romanticism that colors Andy’s account of his 15-year-old sojourn into the Canadian wilderness from the grossly comic experience of watching the sun rise over the San Andreas fault, which, like the liposuction clinic whose waste Andy plucks from his dogs, sucks any possibility of transcendence or sublimity from the moment, the novel erases any trace of “romantic significance” from the desert. Yet many critics continue to imbue the desert in Generation X with such significance, searching for some overt display of resistance and escape from capitalism in their attempts to imbue a radical subcultural politics into the text, reflecting the tendency in subcultural scholarship to make resistance the value against which a text’s legitimacy is measured. For example, Andrew Tate notes that the desert in Generation X “resists commerce and human intervention but promotes imaginative endeavour,” despite the human intervention that crowds the landscape in the form of Palms Springs’ desert windmills and other mechanisms that make the very existence of the desert resort city possible. 75 Additionally, the promotion of imaginative endeavor is not enabled by the desert but seems to be subverted by it; as Andy, Dag, and Claire drive to West Palm Springs Village, they come up with a clichéd and predictable list of “activities people do when 74 Ibid 15. 75 Tate 125. 100 they’re by themselves out in the desert,” which includes stripping, talking to yourself, looking at the view, masturbating, taking nude polaroids, and hoarding little pieces of junk and debris, prompting Dag to observe that “it’s kind of like life, isn’t it?” 76 In an article reflecting on his impending 50th birthday for the Financial Times, Douglas Coupland, recalls the writing of Generation X and his own sojourn to Palm Springs: In a fit of authorial romance, I used a tiny advance, $22,500, and took out a lease on a small bungalow in Palm Springs... that I regretted the moment I arrived. Palm Springs wasn’t anything in 1989... it was a sci-fi like world where an invisible glass dome landed atop a luxury community a week before Richard Nixon’s resignation... I didn’t realise until I got there how it was an embodiment of a long-outdated way of viewing the world... it was this phantasmagorically unhip kingdom I was stuck living in because I was locked into a lease in the state of California, and to break that lease would be credit suicide. 77 The shattering of Coupland’s romantic notions, made abundantly clear by his regret upon arriving in Palm Springs and his realization of its phantasmagorical unhip-ness, is made apparent in the novel. The absence of a middle class leads Andy to conclude that Palm Springs is positively “medieval.” Providing us with both a glimpse into a pre-capitalist past and the future of neoliberal class stratification—what the novel’s marginalia refers to as “Brazilification: The widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes”—Generation X’s Palm Springs makes evident the excesses of consumer capitalism and serves as a prototypical site reflecting neoliberalism’s upward redistribution of wealth. 78 It is this aspect of Palm Springs that ultimately keeps the characters there. Rather than a romanticized space free 76 Ibid 9. 77 Coupland, Douglas. "Regeneration X." Financial Times. 29 March 2013 <http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/c222c31a-9677-11e2-9ab2-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2xg9G99VN> 78 Coupland, Generation X, 11. 101 from the numbing effects of consumer capitalism, the brazilified Palm Springs they inhabit both enables a critique of bourgeois excess and provides a point of contrast to their own lives, in which taxidermied chickens, disembodied deer antlers, an “antique bead belt with GRAND CANYON written on it,” and Trinitite beads in a jar represent the outer limits of their excessive consumption. As Claire, talking to one of Andy’s dogs, notes: “You don’t have to worry about having snowmobiles or cocaine or a third house in Orlando, Florida... You wouldn’t want to worry yourself with so many things. And do you know why?... Because all of those objects would only mutiny and slap you in the face. They’d only remind you that all you’re doing with your life is collecting objects. And nothing else.” 79 Serving as a reminder that the human characters in Generation X are not free from the desires of conspicuous consumption, Claire’s seemingly envious and certainly one-sided conversation with the dog speaks to both her and her friends’ desire to simplify their lives. In striving to “de-complicate” their lives, Claire, Dag, and Andy don’t eschew consumerism altogether, but attempt to reach a point where that consumerism no longer provides the central meaning to their lives. If any romantic significance exists, it exists in the characters’ sense that they are marginalized rather than actively living in the margins, a sense derived from their middle and upper-middle class upbringings which informs their voluntary downward mobility into working class life. Insofar as their working class incomes limit their access to all that consumer capitalism has to offer, their class position and location within what Andy characterizes as a city divided into two distinct classes serves as the geographic element that sets them “apart from the degrading commercial pressures of everyday experience,” indicated by Andy’s statement that “the three of us 79 Ibid 11. 102 chose to live here, for the town is undoubtedly a quiet sanctuary from the bulk of middle- class life.” 80 In the absence of a middle class and its attendant conventions and expectations, Andy, Dag, and Claire ensure that they are at a safe but critical distance from the temptations of normative, middle-class life. The slackers of Coupland’s Generation X are all too aware of the attraction of normative, middle-class life, but are also keenly aware that such a life is not necessarily possible due to the instability and precarity of neoliberal capitalism. To put it another way, there is a sense of foreboding experienced by all three of the novel’s central characters that investing in normative, middle-class consumerist desires will inevitably end in disappointment. Withdrawing from the constipation and drudgery of corporate work and the “compulsions that made us confuse shopping with creativity, to take downers and assume that merely renting a video on a Saturday night was enough,” qualities that the characters associate with middle-class life and the tolls of middle-class aspiration and consumption, they are able to, in however limited a fashion, delineate “a realm of experience felt to be their own, a ‘custom’ that [has] no other foundation than the experience in which it [is] forged.” This is the “why” behind the characters’ decision to move to the desert, “to tell stories and to make our own lives worthwhile tales in the process.” 81 Certainly, the desire to make their lives “worthwhile” tales speaks to an inability to disengage from the binary of “authenticity” and “inauthenticity” affiliated with realms of experience freed from or dictated by capitalism. But the emphasis placed on the “process” of storytelling as the means by which they garner meaning and make their lives worthwhile suggests that the stories that Andy, Dag, and Claire tell one another are not part of some romanticized 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid 8. 103 quest for meaning in a meaningless existence, where meaninglessness is inextricable from consumer capitalism’s artificiality, but as an attempt to find meaning that is not derived solely from, that is not absolutely dependent upon, the oppressive narratives of heteronormative, middle-class life. At the start of a chapter titled “Reconstruct” Andy notes, “Claire and I never fell in love, even though we both tried hard... I’ve never been in love, and that’s a problem. I just seem to end up as friends with everyone, and I tell you, I really hate it. I want to fall in love. Or at least I think I do. I’m not sure. It looks so . . . messy.” 82 Admitting to a lingering desire for the typical romance narrative, Andy and Claire’s (and we are later told Claire and Dag’s) failed attempt to live up to the kinds of romantic ideals peddled by films like When Harry Met Sally (1989) (whose entire plot revolves around the idea that “men and women can never just be friends”), doesn’t result in disappointment but ambivalent indecision about normative desire itself and a disenchantment with the “good life” that such narratives offer. Their ambivalence leads them to strive to develop a different kind of relation to one another, vacated of heterosexual desire, that could result in forms of experience and sociality that deviate from those dictated by corporate employment, middle-class aspiration, and consumer culture in their downward trajectories into working class life. Their “low-income, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future” McJobs in the service sector don’t provide an escape from working life, but do not define them either, allowing the characters to forge a different sense of belonging. Waking up one morning after a night of storytelling, Andy finds “the three of us... sprawled on top of the bed where we fell asleep” and the dogs snoozing on the floor nearby: “These creatures here in this room with me—these are the creatures I love and who love me. Together I feel like 82 Ibid 47. 104 we are a strange and forbidden garden—I feel so happy I could die. If I could have it thus, I would like this moment to continue forever... I go back to sleep.” 83 While Andy’s declaration that “I feel so happy I could die,” suggests that this moment marks one of transcendence, gesturing toward what Tom Roach refers to as “traditional transcendent conceptions of friendship,” Andy’s description of their friendship as “a strange and forbidden garden,” barring its clichéd and romantic language, when considered through his earlier declaration of their “marginalization” and his narration throughout the novel of their disenchantment, gestures toward a model of friendship “as shared estrangement.” 84 In returning to sleep, Andy refuses to render this a moment of radical transcendence, instead giving into the “abandonment to finitude that characterizes the contemporary emotional situation” which “demands that we submit ourselves to finitude as a limit that cannot be contemplated ‘from outside,’ that is unrepresentable and thus truly untranscendable.” 85 Yet Virno notes that “the abandonment to finitude is inhabited by a vigorous feeling of belonging”: True, one no longer “belongs” to a particular role, tradition, or political party. Calls for “participation” and for a “project” have faded. And yet alienation, far from eliminating the feeling of belonging, empowers it. The impossibility of securing ourselves within any durable context disproportionately increases our adherence to the most fragile instances of the “here and now.” What is dazzlingly clear is finally belonging as such, no longer qualified by a determinate belonging “to something.” ...the feeling of belonging, once freed from all roots or any specific “to which,” entertains a formidable critical and transformative potential... 86 Rather than attempting to make “this moment...continue forever,” Andy’s decision to sleep serves as an admission of “the impossibility of securing ourselves within any 83 Ibid 129-130. 84 Roach, Tom. Friendship as a Way of Life: Foucault, AIDS, and the Politics of Shared Estrangement. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012. 117. 85 Virno 32. 86 Ibid. 105 durable context,” rendering any longing for something beyond the “here and now” ephemeral. Rather than breaking free from alienation and estrangement as the basis for belonging in the emotional situation of neoliberal capitalism, Andy draws satisfaction from the fleeting actualization of an insubstantial possibility in the present. 87 As with Virno’s articulation of the radical potential of defection and exodus derived from such an abandonment to finitude, Hall too concludes, “in their ‘moment,’ they begin to suggest and anticipate [a revolutionary project], to sketch it in, like some cast of hired actors perpetually ‘on stage’ in some theatre-in-the-round of the future.” 88 Privilege and Opportunistic Defection While a significant portion of Generation X attempts to portray forms of life in which privilege, though ever-present, is actively and in some instances perhaps even avoided by its central characters, often revealing the underlying economic shifts that are dissolving, at the very least, any understanding of the stability and sustainability of privileges associated with middle-class life, it also consciously explores and in some instances asserts other forms of privilege that are crucial to understanding the slacker both in its early iterations in the 1990s and well into the present. As discussed earlier, the notion of choice as expressed in the novel certainly elucidates the privileged status of its characters. For Annesley, “The problem is... that while this sense of choice makes their actions seem more deliberate, it also gives them a luxurious complexion. These are individuals who are able to make certain kinds of choices, decisions that seem more like 87 I have rephrased Hall's statement in "Hippies": "Trapped and surrounded by civil society as they are, breaking free of a tyranny as personal as that of the family and as world-historical as that of America as a global power, Hippies and their predecessors and successors cannot make actual, except fleetingly, these insubstantial possibilities" (167, emphasis mine). 88 Hall 167. 106 expressions of privilege than anti-materialist gestures.” 89 Of course, slacker narratives often “subtly acknowledge that ‘freedom of choice’ is really a form of intimidation designed to ensure that the consumer buy or be relegated to social invisibility.” 90 To put it another way, Generation X, for the most part, ambivalently deploys “choice” as a means of expressing the narrator’s belief in the heroism of deliberate action but also to reveal the illusion of “freedom” that “choice” itself generates in the neoliberal imaginary. With this in mind, the insistence upon the political as only ever deriving from intentionality (“deliberate action,” “choice”) must be challenged and reconsidered in a neoliberal milieu in which intentionality itself is incorporated into neoliberal rhetorics about choice. As Hall notes regarding the hippies, “...Hippies—perhaps in spite of themselves, and certainly without much conscious intention—have made a contribution to the growth of political contestation with the system.” 91 While he finds the “compulsory anti-materialism” of the slackers in Generation X problematic insofar as it suggests an unintentional and involuntary adoption of a particular ethos, Annesley’s very admission of the compulsory nature of their existence suggests here that the choices made available in the novel’s economic context are quickly diminishing. Misreading the novel’s marginalia as an expression of the characters’ own world-views, Annesley argues that Generation X “is a novel that attempts to celebrate the actions of characters who argue that ‘you can either have a house or a life... I’m having a life’, but in fact ends up portraying characters who would like to own houses if they could, but can’t afford to,” decontextualizing Dag’s pre-breakdown rant about his boss Martin’s million dollar home 89 Annesley 124. 90 Sweet, David LeHardy. "Absentminded Prolepsis: Global Slackers before the Age of Terror in Alex Garland's The Beach and Michel Houellebecq's Plateforme." Comparative Literature 59, 2 (Spring 2007): 161. 91 Hall 161. 107 and pairing it with a marginal, single frame comic panel, as the means of establishing the characters’ underlying but unattainable desire for homeownership. 92 Figure 14. “I’m having a life.” Generation X (142) Of course, Dag does maintain some underlying desire for property-ownership, but this desire takes on a transnational character ignored in Annesley’s reading of the novel, and reveals the ways in which globalization provides the characters’ with an “out” from the national context in which their quickly diminishing choices serve as both a means for “de-complicating” life and as the source of their disenchantment. Late in Generation X, while sitting on the hood of an Aston Martin, burning holes in its roof with the end of his burning cigarette, in a wealthy neighborhood in Palm Springs (a rather common act of anti-bourgeois vandalism that he is prone to engaging in), Dag admits to Andy, “I want to own a hotel down in Baja California. And I think I’m closer than you think to actually doing so... That’s what I want to do in my future. Own a hotel.” 93 While the characters’ “compulsory anti-materialism” may limit the possibilities for property ownership in Palm 92 Annesley 124. 93 Coupland 116. 108 Springs (or anywhere else in the U.S.), Dag’s desire to “open a place down in San Felipe... on the east side of the Baja needle,” speaks to forms of privilege based on transnational economic inequality, in this case, the privileged status of the dollar in relation to the undervalued peso, rendering the low wages of their dead-end McJobs in the U.S. useful and even plentiful through the benefit of exchange rates that are rendered “natural” and unproblematic through the lens of “objective,” free-market capitalism. Here we begin to see an anticipation “with surprising absence of mind [of] a kind of maturation or cultural turn into the new millennium on the part of the so-called Blank or X Generation of the 1980s and 1990s, a turn from a vaunted disaffection with capitalist culture and its ‘ethic of duty’ to a resigned, if sometimes exuberant, acceptance of hegemonic conditions—conditions revealed through the experience of travel.” 94 As he approaches the U.S.-Mexico border, Andy notes: “Under the hood of the Volkswagen are two dozen bottles of Evian water and a flask of Immodium antidiarrheal—certain bourgeois habits die hard.” 95 Here, bourgeois consumption is excused through the transnational logics of whiteness that render “ethnic” consumption a threat to bodily control and health. Whereas consumer capitalism and corporate work are ultimately depicted as posing a threat to the soul (to creativity) throughout Generation X, Andy’s concern regarding consumption in Mexico is focused entirely on its potentially toxic effects on his (white) body. As he slowly lurches through traffic toward Mexico, he sees “the chain link border fence that reminds me of certain photos of Australia—photos in which anti-rabbit fencing has cleaved the landscape in two: one side of the fence nutritious, food secreting, 94 Sweet 158-159 95 Coupland 169. 109 and bursting with green; the other side lunar, granular, parched, and desperate.” 96 Identifying the “lunar side” with Mexico, and the “nutritious, food secreting” side with the U.S., Andy no longer concerns himself with the toxicity of American capitalism, the corporate workplace, and consumer culture, but is able to reimagine the U.S. as a romanticized “land of plenty,” as he compares the health of the U.S. to the “parched and desperate” landscape of Mexico. Recalling “certain photos of Australia—photos in which anti-rabbit fencing has cleaved the landscape in two,” Andy dehumanizes Mexicans, rendering them pests that pose a threat to the “nutritious, food secreting” U.S., as they cross the border like the seemingly uncontrollable rabbit population that threatened Australian agricultural resources and prompted the construction of its “rabbit-proof” fence. The “lunar” quality of Mexico additionally becomes a means of describing its simplicity: “a newer, less-monied world, where a different food chain carves its host landscape in alien ways I can scarcely comprehend.” 97 Mirroring the language of the novel’s final marginal term, “emallgration: migration toward lower-tech, lower- information environments containing a lessened emphasis on consumerism,” it is clear that Andy’s desire to “de-complicate” life directly informs the appeal of Mexico. 98 Describing the “different,” “alien” food chain of Mexico in automotive terms, Andy notes: “Once I cross that border... automobile models will mysteriously end around the decidedly Texlahoman year of 1974, the year after which engine technologies became overcomplex and nontinkerable—uncannibalizable.” 99 Juxtaposing the technological backwardness of Mexico with a “food chain” in which the cannibalization of auto parts 96 Ibid 172. 97 Ibid 171. 98 Ibid 173. 99 Ibid. 110 ends abruptly in 1974, Andy’s rendering of Mexico becomes overwhelmed by a colonial imaginary that equates non-white people with cannibalism and arrested technological and economic development. Mechanical cannibalism is rendered as an indicator of productive stagnation, as the “new” is “overcomplex and nontinkerable,” resulting in an economy that largely relies upon the re-use and re-cycling of goods, a “problem” caused by barriers to free trade that would be “resolved” later in the decade through the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Traveling away from the nutritious and food secreting United States and into the parched and desperate landscape of Mexico, Andy is able to romantically transform the choices he, Dag, and Claire have made into “challenging choices... atypically brave [and] heroically individual,” reproducing white narratives of colonial adventure and manifest destiny in which rugged individualism enables the refashioning of worlds through struggle. 100 Andy thinks “of Dag and Claire when I think of this split—and the way they chose by free will to inhabit the lunar side of the fence—enacting their difficult destinies.” 101 In San Felipe, “where my—our—hotel may some day exist,” Andy imagines that he “will find fences built of whalebones, chromed Toyota bumpers, and cactus spines woven into barbed wire. And down the town’s deliriously white beaches there will be spare figures of street urchins, their faces obscured and overexposed by the brightness of the sun, hopelessly vending cakey ropes of false pearls and lobular chains of fool’s gold... This will be my new landscape.” 102 Emptying the landscape of all human life, with the exception of the “spare figures of street urchins” that dot the beach, Andy’s imagining of San Felipe suggests that “travel 100 Forshaw 41. 101 Coupland 172. 102 Ibid 171-172. 111 does not represent a genuine desire for contact with the host culture; rather, it is a leisurely supplement to a repressed desire for home itself, albeit home recast in the slacker’s self-image.” 103 This desire for a home recast in the slacker’s self-image is made even clearer in Dag’s utopian description of the hotel: [San Felipe] is a tiny shrimping village surrounded by nothing but sand, abandoned uranium mines, and pelicans. I’d open up a small place for friends and eccentrics only, and for staff I’d only hire elderly Mexican women and stunningly beautiful surfer and hippie type boys and girls who have had their brains swiss-cheesed from too much dope. There’d be a bar there, where everyone staples business cards and money to the walls and the ceiling, and the only light would be from ten watt bulbs hidden behind cactus skeletons on the ceiling. We’d spend nights washing zinc salves from each other’s noses, drinking rum drinks, and telling stories. People who told good stories could stay for free. You wouldn’t be allowed to use the bathroom unless you felt-penned a funny joke on the wall. And all of the rooms would be walled in knotty pine wood, and as a souvenir, everyone would receive just a little bar of soap. 104 In his essay “Global Slackers before the Age of Terror,” David LeHardy Sweet writes that “the beach and travel enable... a kind of ‘affiliative’—and thus creative—potential by replacing the world of integrative responsibilities (home, family, nation) with one of self- realization, or at least a self-fulfilling hedonism.” 105 In Dag’s hotel fantasy, self- realization and self-fulfilling hedonism become one, and self-realization is imagined as actualizing in space. Dag’s dreams of entrepreneurship, wherein the forms of “belonging- as-such” developed between he, Andy, and Claire, are transformed from the “noncritical” sharing of stories into the commodification of stories whose values are determined by Dag, Andy, and Claire as arbiters of taste, suggests a “selling out” of the ethos that binds them for the majority of the novel. Andy’s reaction, “I have to admit, Dag’s hotel sounds enchanting,” marks his entry into Dag’s idiosyncratic fantasy of transnational 103 Sweet 163. 104 Coupland 171-172. 105 Sweet 162. 112 entrepreneurship and gentrification, taking on a distinctly HouseHunters International flavor: white Americans and Canadians move to Mexico and other “developing” nations where they can get more bang for their buck and live more extravagant lives than their incomes and capital allow in their nations of origin. While the arrested economic development incited by neoliberalism, in the form of stagnant wages and diminishing opportunities for stable employment and upward mobility in both the workplace and beyond, inspires the characters’ defection from the world of corporate work and middle-class life, the descriptions of Mexico’s arrested development reveals the extent to which this final defection fails to consider and takes advantage of global economic and racial inequalities, given expression through Andy’s description of travel in geographic space as time-travel, which invokes colonial and capitalist temporalities of development. Ultimately, the opportunism that, in part, characterizes the neoliberal era cannot be resisted, as the characters fall back on normative models of maturation informed by capitalist acquisition in the form of property ownership, which continues to be regarded as a crucial achievement marking the subject’s accession into adulthood according to middle-class logics. Ambivalence gives way to resignation and acceptance as narrative resolution demands the restoration of normativity and the slacker finally, inevitably “grows up. 113 Chapter Three “Smells Like Teen Spirit”: Extended Adolescence, Bromance, and Oedipal Acculturation in Knocked Up Mancession Lit portrays the Man-Child as pitiful, contrasting him with women who are well-adjusted and adult. But it rarely acknowledges the real question that this odd couple raises. Namely, are women better suited to the new economy because they are easier to exploit? —Moira Weigel and Mal Ahern, “Further Materials Toward a Theory of the Man-Child,” The New Inquiry Slackers on film play an important role in the lives of nonslackers, former slackers, and anti-slackers alike, existing to gently remind us of our most pure and essential selves, untarnished by work, responsibility, and the Man. And as often as not, women aren’t there to join in the good times, but to undermine the slacker hero, demanding commitment or employment or diverting attention away from his music or friends: a succubus for every pure soul. —Marisa Meltzer, “The Slacker Movie’s Quarterlife Crisis,” Slate In Generation X, Claire tells a story that seemingly anticipates and elucidates the gender inequalities that inform popular representations of slackers in contemporary, and largely cinematic, narratives. “It’s a Texlahoma story,” she tells Andy and Dag, much to their pleasure, “for Texlahoma is a mythic world we created in which to set many of our stories. It’s a sad Everyplace... an asteroid orbiting earth, where the year is permanently 1974, the year after the oil shock and the year starting from which real wages in the U.S. never grew again.” In this story, an astronaut named Buck is forced to land in the suburban backyard of the Texlahoman Monroe family, comprised of Mrs. and Mr. Monroe and their three daughters, Arleen, Darleen, and Serena, after experiencing difficulties with Texlahoma’s gravity, a problem he was completely unaware of because “the people back on earth had forgotten to tell him that Texlahoma even existed!” After being invited in for lunch by Mrs. Monroe, something suddenly goes wrong as “right 114 before Mrs. Monroe’s eyes, Buck began to turn pale green, and his head began to turn boxy and veined, like Frankenstein’s... he had developed space poisoning. He would start to look like a monster, and shortly, he would fall into an almost permanent sleep.” Just before falling asleep, he explains to Mrs. Monroe, “It looks like you’ll have to nurse me for a while,” which she immediately agrees to. While he sleeps, Arleen, Darleen, and Serena each visit Buck, excited by the astronaut/monster’s presence in their home. As Mrs. Monroe’s job selling aloe products out of her garage picks up and, day by day, her daughters are fired from their jobs, the girls take responsibility for Buck’s care. One by one, day by day, each of the Monroe sisters brings Buck lunch, who regains consciousness “once a day at noon, and then only for a half hour.” As each sister visits him love blooms. With each sister, Buck explains that “the radiation waves emitted by a woman in love are of just the right frequency to boost the rocket ship’s engines and help it to lift off.” Of course, there’s a catch, as Buck adds, “there’s only enough air in the ship for one person, and I’m afraid that after takeoff, you’d have to die.” In response, Arleen tells him that she is sorry but that she can’t do what he is asking of her, concluding “that things would probably be for the best if she no longer took care of him.” Buck, “Heartbroken but unsurprised,” falls asleep. When it’s Darleen’s turn to care for him, they fall in love and he explains his situation, to which, like her sister before her, she responds “I’m sorry, Buck, but I can’t do that.” Finally, it’s Serena’s turn, and of course, she and Buck fall in love, and when he explains that the two of them can leave Texlahoma but that she will die (but that he can bring her back to life), Serena agrees to help. 115 The next day, when Buck awakens from his slumber, Serena rushes him to his spaceship which, through the power of love, rumbles to life and takes off into the sky. Below on Texlahoma, the two remaining sisters watch as the rocket flies into space and Arleen turns to Darleen and says, “You realize... that that whole business of Buck being able to bring us back to life was total horseshit.” Darleen responds, “Oh, I knew that... But it doesn’t change the fact that I feel jealous.” 1 Claire’s allegory about male exhaustion and idleness and the role women play in the slacker male’s departure from temporal stagnation and arrested development (represented through the description of Texlahoma as “permanently stuck in 1974”) is, by now, an all too common trope in slacker narratives. Here, Andy’s brief explanation of his and Claire’s (and Dag’s) attempts to forge a romantic relationship, borne out of a sense of normative obligation moreso than romantic or sexual desire, and their ultimate ambivalence regarding such expectations, bears repeating: “Claire and I never fell in love, even though we both tried hard... I’ve never been in love, and that’s a problem. I just seem to end up as friends with everyone, and I tell you, I really hate it. I want to fall in love. Or at least I think I do. I’m not sure. It looks so . . . messy.” 2 The articulation of “never being in love” as a “problem,” and Andy’s uncertainty and admission of not quite understanding why he wants to fall in love (“I want to”), hints at the ways in which compulsory heterosexuality often informs these desires in the absence of romantic and sexual attraction. 3 This chapter explores the pairing of compulsory heterosexuality with obligatory ambition in the 2007 romantic comedy Knocked Up, wherein the slacker is 1 Coupland, Generation X, 39-45. 2 Ibid 47. 3 See Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Feminism and Sexuality: A Reader. Eds. Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. 130-141. 116 deployed as a means of reifying heteronormative, capitalist narratives of maturation. Focusing on the figure of the slacker-as-man-child, whose extended adolescence is often obnoxiously depicted in films as a form of liberation—from work, from adulthood, from marriage, from parenthood, and their attendant responsibilities—through the care-free attitude and lifestyle of the slacker, and at times through sonic, linguistic, and other signifiers of blackness that problematically reproduce racialized temporalities of arrested development, this chapter considers the various ways in which the contemporary slacker’s extended adolescence is represented and how it ultimately reaffirms traditional gender hierarchies and models of adulthood despite the outward appearance of deviation from them. Extending Adolescence While queer theorists, such as Jack Halberstam, have theorized the importance of extended adolescence to understandings of queer (or non-normative) temporalities, recent media coverage seems to suggest that the extension of adolescence into periods typically associated with adulthood is increasingly becoming the norm. But rather than a “queer” turn in mainstream, heterosexual culture, the extended adolescence of an increasing number of American youth both reflects the wide-ranging effects of neoliberalism as an economic and cultural formation, and ultimately reinforces normative narratives of development. To put it another way, “extended adolescence” is understood not as perpetual, and therefore marking an opposition or refusal to adhere to normative temporality, but as a “stage” one must pass through on the inevitable path to adulthood as understood via heteronormative, middle-class logics. 117 In an August 18, 2010 article for The New York Times Magazine, Robin Marantz Henig asked the decades old question, “What Is It About 20-Somethings?” Noting the increasing number of college graduates, both undergraduate and graduate students alike, returning home to live with their parents, postponing marriage, pursuing “an average of seven jobs” in a single decade, and changing residences on a yearly basis, Henig provides a by now all too familiar portrait of this seemingly misunderstood and fascinating demographic. 4 “[U]ntethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life,” twentysomethings show that the “traditional cycle” of development—the “orderly progression in which kids finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and eventually retire to live on pensions supported by the next crop of kids who finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and on and on”—has seemingly “gone off course.” Such concerns, of course, aren’t entirely new. In the 1960s, Henig writes, Yale psychologist Kenneth Keniston observed that “a growing minority of post-adolescents have not settled the questions whose answers once defined adulthood: questions of relationship to the existing society, questions of vocation, questions of social role and lifestyle,” and proposed a new stage of life he called “youth.” In her 1986 book The Postponed Generation: Why American Youth Are Growing Up Later, Susan Littwin noted with concern the extension of adolescence by a decade as young people took longer to assume adult responsibilities than their predecessors. TIME’s 1990 “twentysomething” 4 Henig, Robin Marantz. "What Is It About 20-Somethings?" The New York Times Magazine. 18 August 2010. <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0>. 118 issue reported that “What worries parents, teachers and employers is that the latest crop of adults wants to postpone growing up. At a time when they should be graduating, entering the work force and starting families of their own, the twentysomething crowd is balking at those rites of passage.” Henig writes that these rites of passage are typically associated with five milestones that sociologists have traditionally attributed to the “transition to adulthood”: “completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child.” Admitting to the anachronism of “milestones” and their implication of “a lockstep march toward adulthood,” she proceeds into a lengthy overview of Jeffrey Jensen Arnett’s work on “emerging adulthood,” a new “life stage” spanning the time between the age of 18 to the late 20s. Spurred on by social, economic, and cultural changes including “the need for more education to survive in an information-based economy; fewer entry-level jobs even after all that schooling; young people feeling less rush to marry because of the general acceptance of premarital sex, cohabitation and birth control; and young women feeling less rush to have babies given their wide range of career options and their access to assisted reproductive technology if they delay pregnancy beyond their most fertile years,” “emerging adulthood” constitutes a period of time during which presumptively heterosexual late-teens and twentysomethings take the time to negotiate a world that is not entirely conducive to earlier, “traditional cycles” of maturation and social reproduction but nevertheless remain informed by white, middle- class logics. Making note of the emergence of “adolescence” as a category in the early 20th century, itself a response to changes in child-labor laws and industrial productive 119 processes, “emerging adulthood” as a category is informed by the economic changes often associated with deindustrialization and neoliberalization, the reorganization of gendered labor, and advancements in reproductive technologies that have allowed women to postpone motherhood. Rather than a disruption to the repetition compulsion characterizing not only media, and mainstream sociological and psychological, fascinations with “twentysomethings” but also the paranoid temporality of heteronormative economic and social inheritance in Henig’s description of “orderly progression,” emerging adulthood serves as a productive delay; the traditional milestones aren’t anachronistic so much as they are merely deferred. Emerging adulthood’s “particular psychological profile” consists of “identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in-between and a rather poetic characteristic... ‘a sense of possibilities’,” recalling the Britney Spears hit in which she declares, “I’m not a girl,/Not yet a woman./All I need is time,/A moment that is mine,/While I’m in between.” While Spears’ lyrics gesture toward a shared sense of “in between-ness” and the need for more “me” time attributed to emerging adults as a whole, her insistence that she’s “not a girl, not yet a woman” clearly indicates an understanding of this seemingly transitional phase as a gendered experience. Arnett and others have noted that the economic and cultural changes informing “emerging adulthood” as a category have had differing impacts on men and women. In “Emerging Adulthood(s),” Arnett notes that the transition from manufacturing and industrial jobs to information, technology, and services in nations belonging to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) has had an “especially striking” impact on women: “At the same time as the shift from a manufacturing economy to an information/technology/services 120 economy has taken place, a revolution in women’s roles and rights has taken place, and the combination has brought young women into higher education in vast numbers.” 5 Richard Settersten and Barbara E. Ray also make note of this trend in Not Quite Adults, adding that “today women outnumber men in both undergraduate and graduate schools and in degree completion. In certain cities, such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, they are outearning men for the first time.” 6 A variety of such studies arrive at the same conclusion: the surge in women’s entry into higher education, their participation in the work force and increasing tendency to outearn men enables them to postpone marriage. 7 In this view, “emerging adulthood” for women represents that transitional period leading into a fully realized adulthood wherein marriage and parenthood remain the necessary conditions for the fulfillment of women’s developmental maturation. While Arnett views the exploration of self as a crucial characteristic of “emerging adulthood,” the seemingly inevitable transition into full-fledged adulthood departs from Spears’ more potentially utopian lyrics, wherein the “in between” represents a triumphant “moment that is mine,” between the parental oversight of childhood and the adult responsibilities of compulsory motherhood, the indefinite extension of which could serve as a kind of liberation from the constraints of 5 Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen. "Emerging Adulthood(s): The Cultural Psychology of a New Life Stage." Bridging Cultural and Developmental Approaches to Psychology: New Synthesis in Theory, Research, and Policy. Ed. Lene Arnett Jensen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 258. 6 Settersten, Richard and Barbara E. Ray. Not Quite Adults: Why 20-Somethings Are Choosing a Slower Path to Adulthood, and Why It's Good for Everyone. New York: Bantam Books, 2010. 82. 7 Arnett writes, "As opportunities expanded for women in the workplace and in higher education, there was less pressure on them to marry at a young age to avoid the dreaded fate of becoming an 'old maid' with a secondary role in their society, and more incentive for them to wait until they had finished a period of postsecondary education and established themselves in the workplace before entering marriage and parenthood" (Arnett 259). Settersten and Ray make a similar observation, "Education and larger salaries are two critical factors in the decision of whom to marry and when, and educated women now have more of both... The economic downturn has pushed the wedding date back even farther" (Settersten & Ray 82). 121 developmental models that insist upon particular forms of life as constituting “authentic” and socially acceptable adulthood. In In a Queer Time and Place, Halberstam writes, “The notion of a stretched-out adolescence... challenges the conventional binary formulation of a life narrative divided by a clear break between youth and adulthood; this life narrative charts an obvious transition out of childish dependency through marriage and into adult responsibility through reproduction.” 8 While Halberstam understands extended adolescence as challenging the youth/adulthood binary and having the potential to offer alternative life narratives that break from heteronormative business as usual, he also notes that “young white men are often encouraged to prolong their periods of adolescent fun and games long beyond their teenage years,” an extended adolescence often “accompanied by high degrees of misogyny and homophobia.” 9 Rather than the utopianism of Halberstam’s formulation of a decidedly queer extended adolescence, the extended adolescence of straight, white men is not only accompanied by misogyny and homophobia but also reifies their privilege in both new and not so new ways. Arrested Development If the period of emerging adulthood has largely been beneficial to women, enabling them to pursue college degrees and jobs, prompting many to note the recent economic success achieved by women as they become the majority of the American workforce and are “on pace to outearn men” nationwide, then it has seemingly had the opposite effect on men. In Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, a book that helped popularize the idea of a crisis of masculinity in the U.S., Susan Faludi links the crisis to 8 Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 153. 9 Ibid 175. 122 the deindustrialization and corporate restructuring that resulted in mass lay-offs affecting men of both the working and middle classes beginning in the 1970s. In the nearly exclusive attention she pays to white men, we hear the by now familiar refrain of the Angry White Male who rails against feminism, gays and lesbians, or people of color (or all of them at once) for taking what rightfully belonged to them. A media-saturated consumer culture subjects men to forms of ornamental masculinity, transforming manhood into something that is “displayed” rather than “demonstrated,” imbuing it with qualities that resemble traditional understandings of femininity. This ornamental masculinity is expressed through consumption and is therefore stylistic and prosthetic, it is all surface and without depth. The crisis of masculinity is the crisis of absent, abusive, or emotionally distant fathers, and is therefore an Oedipal crisis, though Faludi is largely blind to her own construction of the crisis as such. 10 Despite her identification of deindustrialization, corporate restructuring, the outsourcing of jobs, and consumer culture as the culprits in the “betrayal of the American man,” a critique of neoliberal capitalism never emerges; instead, Faludi unwittingly reproduces the nostalgia of the straight white men that make up the majority of her interview subjects who long to return to an imagined time of prosperity, when their masculinity and their lives actually meant something, and when fathers provided strong models for their sons for how to be men and gave them hope for the future. 11 In “Omega Males and the Women Who Hate Them,” Jessica Grose notes that cinematic representations of slackers are “pretty much the fictional representation of the 10 Faludi, Susan. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1999. 11 In fact, Stiffed begins with a story that recalls the Reaganite nostalgia for the post-war period: "When I listen to the sons born after World War II, born to the fathers who won that war, I sometimes find myself in a reverie, conjured out of my own recollections and theirs. The more men I talk to, the more detailed this imagined story becomes" (Faludi 3). 123 masculinity crisis that Susan Faludi outlined in her 1999 book Stiffed.” 12 Faludi’s portrait of the crisis of American masculinity seems to be more in line with the disenchantment and rage expressed by the characters of Fight Club—who bemoan being raised by single mothers, smirk at Calvin Klein ads and ask “Is that what a real man is supposed to look like?”, and then beat the crap out of each other as a deluded means of feeling something authentic (pain and its pleasures) and authentically masculine—rather than the slackers and losers that litter today’s Apatovian cinematic landscape. 13 Yet slackers have increasingly been represented as inhabiting a world in which white male powerlessness and inertia are the result of economic shifts that have contributed to the changing role of women; a world in which feminism has led to women’s empowerment at the expense of men. Unwilling to adapt to these changes, Grose observes that white heterosexual masculinity is stuck in a rut: “The image of American woman has gone through several upheavals since the 1950s, but the masculine ideal seems fixed in cultural aspic: Think slick ad executive Don Draper in Mad Men and the WWII heroes in the Tom Hanks- produced HBO series The Pacific. So his confused, paralyzed counterpart is cropping up in ever-more variations on TV and in movies: the omega male.” Unable to live up to bygone models of masculinity like the self-made man or the mythically heroic and selfless men of Tom Brokaw’s “greatest generation,” the omega male apparently lingers 12 Grose, Jessica. "Omega Males and the Women Who Hate Them." Slate. 18 March 2010. <http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2010/03/omega_males_and_the_women_who_hate_them .html>. The title of this piece is somewhat misleading as "the Women Who Hate Them" are entirely absent from the discussion. 13 Faludi herself praised Fight Club in a review for Newsweek, applauding it for reasons that appear to stem from the film's similarities to the arguments made in her book, noting with a particularly Gen X sensibility that the main character played by Edward Norton represents "the modern male predicament: he's fatherless, trapped in a cubicle in an anonymous corporate job, trying to glean an identity from Ikea brochures, entertainment magazines and self-help gatherings. Jack traverses a barren landscape familiar to many men who must contend with a world stripped of socially useful male roles and saturated with commercial images of masculinity" (89). Faludi, Susan. "It's 'Thelma & Louise' for guys." Newsweek, 134.17 (25 Oct. 1999). 124 in a masculine limbo, unsure of how to proceed due to a perceived absence of viable alternatives, or so many articles on the crisis of masculinity and the rise of women suggest. The confusion and paralysis of Grose’s omega male mirrors the stubborn inflexibility attributed to men and masculinity in much of the mainstream coverage of the “crisis” of masculinity and the rise of women in the U.S. In “The End of Men,” Hanna Rosin notes that men “have proved remarkably unable to adapt” to changing economic conditions, particularly in relation to the growth of “nurturing professions” such as teaching and nursing, despite recruitment efforts specifically targeting men. 14 Grose writes that, despite the latest economic recession and its reduction of job security to a fantasy, “men are still tragically unable to retool.” Asking “What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men?” Rosin often seems to suggest, like Grose, that the adaptability and flexibility of women have made them particularly suited to the forms of production and socialization, to recall Paulo Virno’s work on the ambivalence of disenchantment, of the post-industrial, neoliberal economy. Meanwhile, men’s inability or unwillingness to adapt is leaving them increasingly marginalized in an economic system characterized by constant change and insecurity. But as Moira Weigel and Mal Ahern note in the opening epigraph to this chapter, the better question might be “are women better suited to the new economy because they are easier to exploit?” In turning to the omega male as an example of paralysis, both writers overlook the ways in which slacker masculinity might itself be an opportunistic adaptation to this 14 Rosin, Hanna. "The End of Men." The Atlantic. 8 June 2010. <http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/308135/>. 125 modern, postindustrial economy in which women are increasingly becoming the breadwinners. That is, the inertia of the slacker is not simply a symptom of late capitalism but can be understood as an adaptation that enables him to benefit from the economic success achieved by women. As Andrew Ross explains in “The Great White Dude,” “Patriarchy is constantly reforming masculinity, minute by minute, day by day. Indeed, the reason why patriarchy remains so powerful is due less to its entrenched traditions than to its versatile capacity to shape-change and morph the contours of masculinity to fit with shifts in the social climate.” 15 Rather than marking the tragic downside of matriarchy’s potential ousting of patriarchy (as many articles on the rise of women and the end of men speculate) this “new” masculinity exploits the contemporary social climate and the women who have benefited from it. In “The Slacker Movie’s Quarterlife Crisis,” Marisa Meltzer makes note of a scene from the 2005 mumblecore film The Puffy Chair which demonstrates the increased exploitation of women on the part of slacker men: About halfway through The Puffy Chair, there is a surprise wedding with ad-libbed vows, provided for both bride and groom by Josh, that are supposed to be at once funny and moving. So, the groom solemnly intones to his bride that “when and if something goes bad between us, I will never look elsewhere for happiness.” Fine. But her vows are so much more telling: “I promise to always support you in what you want, even when you don’t know what you want. And I promise I will never pressure you to do or be anything you don’t want to be.” 16 While the traditional role of “supporting one’s man” is nothing new, this example also suggests that such a task involves taking full responsibility for the slacker’s unwillingness 15 Ross, Andrew. "The Great White Dude." Constructing Masculinity. Eds. Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, Simon Watson. New York & London: Routledge, 1995. 172. 16 Meltzer, Marissa. "The Slacker Movie's Quarterlife Crisis: Mutual Appreciation and The Puffy Chair reveal a genre stuck in a rut." Slate. 22 Feb. 2007. <http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/dvdextras/2007/ 02/ the_slacker_movies_quarterlife_crisis.2.html>. 126 to work by becoming not only the sole income-earner but also attending to the household while he sits at home doing nothing (the slacker does not, in these situations, take on the burden of unpaid domestic labor—after all, where’s the reward in that?), while also having to put up with his entitled and static sense of self. The bride in The Puffy Chair is infinitely accommodating while her groom gets to enjoy the male privilege of voluntary inertia. In Halberstam’s discussion of the “brave new world made up of abundantly competent women and totally incompetent men” in Gaga Feminism, he notes that slacker films, and the mumblecore genre in particular, often try “to make sense of this new development and contain its wild potential.” 17 In a world in which “white heterosexual women become more competent, more powerful, and better paid... men are relieved of their obligations to be efficient and productive. If the woman is earning well, then maybe the man can take a long break. If she can manage the household, the kids, the banking, the shopping, and their sex life, then maybe he should just kick back, put his feet up, and wait for her to tell him what to do.” 18 Calling the particular form of masculinity on display in mumblecore films as well as the man-child comedies of Judd Apatow’s cinematic oeuvre “angler” masculinity, Halberstam explores the parasitic nature of white male slackers, revealing not only the opportunism at the heart of this particular masculine type, but also the “sad state of affairs that we call heterosexual romance” characterized by a “model of heterosexuality that invests in the idea that any guy who will marry you is marriage material.” 19 Despite soaring divorce rates and shifting gender roles, many 17 Halberstam, J. Jack. Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012. 18-19. 18 Ibid 20-21. 19 Ibid 22. 127 continue to cling to a fantasy of marriage as the inevitable and necessary end-point for increasingly outdated models of intimate relation that reproduce traditional gender hierarchies despite the economic “progress” achieved by women. The films of Judd Apatow and the mumblecore genre presume an “economy of scarcity of men who have their lives together” and their white heterosexual female characters must be willing to settle for any man willing to settle down, a notion that has gained some currency beyond the realm of cinema. 20 Unwilling to seek “meaningful” employment, spending much of their time avoiding romantic entanglements or fumbling their way through relationships like awkward teenagers, “omega males” and “angler men” are nonetheless depicted as disarming and charming to the beautiful and successful women with whom they share the screen. Reflecting Grose’s assessment of masculinity as fixed in cultural aspic, Meltzer notes that contemporary slacker films “reveal a genre stuck in a rut.” Discussing Andrew Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation and the Duplass brothers’ The Puffy Chair, she notes that “Both films’ directors stay true to the slacker movie template by making their hapless protagonists irresistible to women... Regardless of questionable hygiene or rampant self- obsession, slackers never lack in love interests.” Observing the faithfulness to their 90s predecessors in the films’ lack of deviation from the “tried and true slacker formula of 20 I borrow the phrase "economy of scarcity of men" from Carla Freccero, quoted in Spicuzza, Mary. "Slacker Guys and Striver Girls: When lazy men become projects for career women." SF Weekly. 14 Nov. 2007. <http://www.sfweekly.com/2007-11-14/news/slacker-guys-and-striver-girls/>. The increasingly common perception of the reality of this economy of scarcity is evidenced in books like Lori Gottlieb's Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough (2010). In Gaga Feminism, Halberstam writes of Lori Gottlieb's book Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, in which Gottlieb, "a graduate of the 'beggars can't be choosers' school of feminism, thinks the problem is that the average white straight woman has impossibly high standards and that no man can ever live up to the ideals of romance to which she clings. While it is OK to have high standards in your twenties and thirties, Gottlieb warns, by your forties, when men are thin on the ground and biological clocks are ticking, you better grab a partner, any partner (short, balding, with physically repulsive mannerisms or socially inexcusable hobbies), and— yup, you guessed it—marry him!" (68). 128 post-collegiate white kids wrestling with their McJobs and love lives,” Meltzer points out that this fidelity to earlier slacker narratives (with the exception of Richard Linklater’s Slacker) is also a problem with the genre: Slackers are always childlike men, and the objects of their affection always women with their acts together, as if slacking is a uniquely male vocation. Women in these movies are never equals; they may be able to parse the finer points of Josie and the Pussycats, but the issues that really occupy them aren’t pop culture ephemera, but marriage, money, and babies. If male slackers are stuck in a permanent state of adolescence, all deep thoughts and long talks and sleeping in, then women are agents of growing up and getting a grip, two things that could harsh any slacker’s mellow. Resembling the overgrown boys in Adam Sandler’s oedipal comedies of the 1990s, today’s slackers are man-children who seem, in many cases, to desperately cling to childhood as that point in the past when they were free from the responsibilities associated with adult life as defined by work, marriage, and parenthood. Taking the form of conventional romance plots and coming-of-age stories (often merging the two through heteronormative logics of development), the vast majority of recent movies about the man-child slacker reproduce narratives of Oedipal resolution as the slacker must inevitably grow up, marked by his entry into a committed, monogamous relationship. In his discussion of oedipal comedies, Halberstam provides a useful description of the genre informing the plots of the vast majority of slacker films: “In an oedipal comedy, the overgrown boy resists adult manhood and indeed seems inadequate to its demands. The plot involves the boy’s accession to maturity, which is marked by the beginning of a heterosexual romance with an acceptable female love object; the love object may find the funny boy humorous but not ridiculous, and this distinction allows him access to the 129 illusion of mastery.” 21 Unlike the king comedies that are Halberstam’s primary focus in “Oh Behave! Austin Powers and the Drag Kings,” which see their comic heroes “grapple with the serious limitations of male masculinity in a world where feminism has empowered women, changes in the workplace have altered dominant conceptions of masculinity, and queer models of gender seem far more compelling and much more successful than old-fashioned heterosexual models of gender polarity,” contemporary slacker films often reassert these old-fashioned heteronormative models within the very contexts Halberstam identifies. Contrasting the economic empowerment and success of their female characters with the ineptitude and irresponsibility of their slacker counterparts, these films emphasize this disparity as a means of masking the ongoing gender inequality that structures their relationships. 22 As Meltzer concludes in her discussion of slacker films, “The new slate of slacker movies is retro not just because they imply that women can’t properly hang with the guys; it’s something far more nefarious and old-fashioned than that. Essentially, they’re saying that women have to be there to care for and motivate a man—and in that responsibility, there’s no room to slack off.” While The Puffy Chair presents us with a moment in which a slacker’s striver bride vows that she “will never pressure you to do or be anything you don’t want to be,” many other slacker narratives pair the slacker’s oedipal accession to maturity with his accession into the world of work, often directly prompted by his love interest or in order to resolve a deficiency that threatens their relationship. This accession into the adult world of work is a crucial characteristic of what Kristin Ross, informed by the work of 21 Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place 136. 22 Ibid. 130 Georg Lukács and Jean-Paul Sartre, calls the novel of acculturation. In The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, Ross writes that in this genre, which she refers to as “the exemplary bourgeois cultural project,” “The alienated youth is reintegrated and accommodated to a generally conservative moral and social order through a process involving trial and error, exposure to the wisdom and experience of others, the acquiring of independent judgment, and the ensuing recognition of the individual’s role in the objective social world.” 23 Noting both Lukács’ and Sartre’s identification of “the centrality of the role of métier [a trade, profession, or occupation] in the narrative construction of the bourgeois subject” deemed essential to the novel of acculturation, Ross writes that “The reconciliation of the aspirations of the subject to the objective limitations imposed on him or her by an alienated world is charted through the subject’s gradual accession into the world of work.” 24 If, as Andrew Horton writes of romantic comedies, “romance requires personal compromise and social integration,” most contemporary slacker films are structured around a synthesis of narratives of acculturation and Oedipal development as the primary means by which compromise and social integration are achieved. 25 Many slacker narratives chart the emergence of the slacker from an extended adolescence into adulthood not only through his decision to enter into a romantic, heterosexual relationship with an appropriate female love object, but also through his entry into the adult world of work as a necessary prerequisite for his partner to view him as truly worthy of her affections or, to use Darwinian terms, to determine his fitness as a mate. 23 Ross, Kristin. The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune. London & New York: Verso, 2008. 48. 24 Ibid 49-50. 25 Horton, Andrew S. "Introduction." Comedy/Cinema/Theory. Ed. Andrew S. Horton. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991. 11. 131 The reintegration of the “alienated youth,” in this case the man-child, “to a generally conservative moral and social order” via white, heterosexual, middle-class models of development in slacker films is exemplified by the 2007 Judd Apatow comedy Knocked Up. Following the lives of Ben (Seth Rogen) and Alison (Katherine Heigl) after a drunken one-night stand results in accidental pregnancy, the film charts their sudden and forced transition from “emerging adults” to full-fledged adulthood as they are both confronted with impending parenthood. Of course, this transition into normative adulthood is highly gendered and reflective of the economic and social conditions mentioned above. Ben is an unemployed, slacker man-child who is living off of the ever dwindling settlement money he received after being hit by a car. He lives with a group of his mostly male friends (and one predominantly mute Asian girlfriend played by the woefully underutilized Charlyne Yi) with whom he spends the majority of his time smoking weed and devising a redundant soft porn celebrity website à la Mr. Skin. Alison is an ambitious, career-driven woman who has just been promoted to a correspondent position at E!, and lives in her upper-middle class sister Debbie (Leslie Mann) and brother-in-law Pete’s (Paul Rudd) pool house. After Alison, for reasons never made clear in the film, decides to keep the baby despite both Ben and her mother’s insistence that she get an abortion, the film follows the unlikely couple as they struggle to fall in love, find the perfect (read “not creepy”) OB/GYN, and overcome Alison’s raging hormones and Ben’s laziness and immaturity. 26 As the film progresses, Alison, who initially tries to 26 Arielle Zibrak writes, "Films like Knocked Up (2007), Juno (2007), and Waitress (2007) tell the stories of women who unintentionally find themselves pregnant. Instead of terminating their pregnancies, all three female protagonists begrudgingly carry their children to term and, lo and behold, the bouncing baby is the joyful solution to the emptiness of their workaday lives.... The message delivered here is clear: our narratives cannot reward women who choose to abort their pregnancies. They are the villains, not the protagonists, and have no place in our system of cultural ideals." From "Intolerance, A Survival Guide: 132 be open-minded about Ben’s potential to be a good father and possibly even husband, becomes increasingly skeptical as he regularly proves to be woefully unprepared and reluctant to accept the responsibilities of impending fatherhood. Promising to read baby books before quickly forgetting them, unable to pay for anything related to their unborn child beyond those very books he initially fails to read, constantly dismissing Alison’s emotional outbursts as unreasonable hormonal ravings, and regularly failing to grow up and give up his lazy, stoner ways, Ben proves to be a poor romantic and parental partner. On the other hand, the film regularly shuttles back and forth between a sympathetic portrayal of Alison as a concerned mother-to-be and a more insidious depiction of her as an overbearing, overly demanding micromanager, which at times lends credence to Ben’s assertions of her irrationality. Ultimately, of course, Ben steps up, miraculously finding a job as a web-designer and even managing to rent a spacious apartment in less than two months, giving him ample time to move in and decorate and furnish the baby’s room while he catches up on all that reading he neglected to do in preparation for his daughter’s birth. When Alison calls him, panicked, alone, and on the verge of giving birth, he rushes to her aid, driving her to the hospital where the baby is born and they live happily ever after. Although Knocked Up spends an equal amount of time with Ben and Alison, both together and separately, the film’s coming of age story ultimately focuses on Ben’s emergence into normative adulthood. Because Alison’s character is established from the outset as a mature and responsible adult her character undergoes little, if any, development over the course of the movie. Even her accidental pregnancy is the result of Heteronormative Culture Formation in Cormac McCarthy's The Road." Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory. Vol. 68, Num. 3 (Autumn 2012): 110. 133 Ben’s irresponsible and ridiculous interpretation of her demand to “just do it already” with regard to putting on a condom as an invitation for unprotected sex. And her decision not to terminate her pregnancy is meant to be taken as yet another sign of her adult sense of responsibility. While she does, at one point, quite graciously accept Ben for who he is, telling him that “I don’t want to force you to be what I think you should be. That’s wrong of me because you’re great, you really are. You’re great the way you are and, I mean, you like to get high and you like to do shrooms in Vegas... who am I to stop you? Who am I to tell you that that’s wrong? It’s who you are and it’s what you enjoy and that’s your life,” this is said not in the context of accepting him as her boyfriend but as part of a rejection in which she explains that their incompatibility will ultimately result in the same misery and antagonism that characterizes her sister’s marriage; it is a resigned acceptance. Eschewing the normative mandate which assumes that the “stability” of marriage and the nuclear family are the best and “healthiest” contexts for childrearing, Alison’s rejection speech certainly suggests a departure from her previous assumptions, neither resigning to single motherhood (she tells Ben that he will still play a significant role in their child’s life) nor insisting upon the necessity of romantic love that so often informs idealized understandings of the nuclear family. 27 Ben, on the other hand, undergoes significant development as he transitions from being an irresponsible stoner to a sober, gainfully employed and thus financially responsible romantic partner and father. If, as Halberstam notes, “the illusion of mastery” 27 In his essay on the construction of masculinity in contemporary bromances, John Alberti writes of Knocked Up: "The birth of the baby functions magically not so much to resolve the plot as to suggest that the further progress (if that's the right word) of the relationships under examination are a kind of fait accompli. Caught up in the moment, Debbie even suggests a longing for another child, an idea that scares Pete but that also ominously points to the inefficacy of assuming that parenthood will automatically create a lasting bond between the characters" (170). Alberti, John. "'I Love You, Man': Bromances, the Construction of Masculinity, and the Continuing Evolution of the Romantic Comedy." Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 30:2 (2013): 170. 134 serves as a crucial component of the Oedipal comedy’s representation of the man-child’s maturation, then the film establishes this clearly in Ben’s apparent mastery of the pregnancy guides. When he finds Alison relaxing in her sister’s bathtub in an attempt to delay going into labor, Ben asks pointed questions to determine whether or not it will be possible to get her to the hospital in time to deliver the baby. When he asks her a question that confounds her and then proceeds to explain it, Alison is both surprised and pleased with the time and effort he has put into learning about childbirth. His “mastery” in this instance signals to Alison that he has indeed changed and is worthy of her affections, rendering Alison’s earlier acceptance of who he is and decision not to pursue a romantic relationship with him largely moot. Sacrificing his extended adolescence in order to be who Alison wants and needs him to be, he emerges at the end of the film as, in Alison’s words, “the right guy for me.” Normativity is restored along with romance and the happy nuclear family slowly drives—to ensure the baby’s safety, of course—to their new home together. Racializing Extended Adolescence While the conclusion of Knocked Up resolves the film’s central crisis of white, heterosexual masculinity, in which the extended adolescent grows up by taking personal responsibility in the form of gainful employment, romantic commitment, and investment in fatherhood, its depictions of extended adolescence provide crucial insights into the forms of masculinity upon which both the childishness of its slackers and Ben’s accession into an assertive, adult manhood are, at times problematically, based. The movie’s opening credits show Ben and his roommates as they engage in a variety of activities in the style of American Gladiators with a particularly suburban backyard 135 stoner flavor. Balancing on a wooden beam placed above their filthy and stagnant swimming pool as they knock each other into the water with pugil sticks and boxing gloves that have been set on fire, there is a particular recklessness to their seemingly ordinary activities that has less to do with the assertion of an aggressive, “alpha male” masculinity than a childlike performance of that masculinity through simulated violence as play. Taking a break to smoke weed with fishbowls placed over their heads and dancing (quite poorly) with one another, the film intercuts these backyard moments with brief snapshots of an afternoon spent riding roller coasters at Six Flags Magic Mountain. As the movie suddenly cuts to Alison waking up at 7AM and proceeding to get ready for work, it’s made clear that the activities of her male counterpart and his bros aren’t some weekend diversion but what they regularly do with their unemployed free time. This opening sequence depicting their adolescent horseplay plays out to the music of Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Shimmy Shimmy Ya,” in which the rapper repeats the lyrics “Hey, baby, I like it raw/Yeah baby, I like it raaaaw!” in his trademark drawl, foreshadowing the unprotected sex that will set the film’s plot in motion. As John Alberti observes, “their typical daily activities—roughhousing, smoking dope, visiting theme parks—all played in slow motion as if they were exciting action sequences... positions these young men as classic examples of arrested development.” 28 In addition, the use of slow motion contrasts with the normal pace of Alison’s morning, gesturing towards the slowing down of time enabled by smoking weed and the urgency and rapidity associated with labor time. While Alberti notes that the film’s use of the song gestures toward “exaggerated and parodic forms of hip hop hyper-masculinity,” the connection the film draws between black masculinity and the characters’ extended adolescence is ignored as he moves onto a 28 Alberti 165. 136 discussion of the Apatovian slacker as lacking “clearly defined social roles that are necessarily encoded for masculinity”; a lack which establishes the slacker’s aimlessness (rather than selfishness) and the particularities of the perpetual adolescence he inhabits. 29 By ignoring the deeper implications of the film’s juxtaposition of the song with its opening establishment of the extended adolescence of its white, male slackers, Alberti misses an opportunity to not only elaborate upon his own argument regarding the destabilization of “masculinity” and the typically heteronormative circuits of desire in romantic comedies that he attributes to the bromance but to problematize the ways in which the film racializes their arrested development vis-à-vis “white associations of black maleness with the onset of pubescent sexuality.” 30 In his work on white American manhood’s reliance upon black masculinity as both a necessary “racial other against which it defines itself and which to a very great extent it takes up into itself as one of its own constituent elements,” Eric Lott explores the ways in which the performance of black masculinity by white men in the form of minstrelsy posits blackness as a phase through which white men must pass on their way to adulthood. 31 Additionally, white men’s “combined vigilance and absorptive cross-racial fascination” with black manhood- as-arrested adolescence reveals the aspirations of dominant white masculinity, which white men both desire and must resist. 32 Lott writes: 29 Ibid. 30 Here Ol' Dirty Bastard's song takes on additional significance, not only as a means of foreshadowing the irresponsible unprotected sex that leads to Alison's pregnancy in the film, but the recklessness associated with ODB's own preference for doing it "raw." In the "Intro" to Return to the 36 Chambers (1995), the same album featuring "Shimmy Shimmy Ya," he raps "remember the time I told y'all/When I got burnt, gonorrhea," recalling his earlier admission on the Wu-Tang Clan's Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) (1993) track "Shame on a Nigga": "Got burnt once, but that was only gonorrhea." 31 Lott, Eric. "White Like Me: Racial Cross-Dressing and the Construction of American Whiteness." Cultures of U.S. Imperialism. Eds. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. 476. 32 Ibid 482. 137 I would maintain that this dynamic, persisting into adulthood, is so much a part of most American white men’s equipment for living that they remain entirely unaware of their participation in it. The special achievement of minstrel performers was to have intuited and formalized the white male fascination with the turn to black (manhood), which Leslie Fielder puts this way: “Born theoretically white, we are permitted to pass our childhood as imaginary Indians, our adolescence as imaginary Negroes, and only then are expected to settle down to being what we really are: white once more.” These common white associations of black maleness with the onset of pubescent sexuality indicate that the assumption of dominant codes of masculinity in the United States is partly negotiated through an imaginary black interlocutor. If this suggests that minstrelsy’s popularity depended in part on the momentary return of its partisans to a state of arrested adolescence—largely the condition to which dominant codes of masculinity aspire—one must also conclude that white male fantasies of black men undergird the subject positions white men grow up to occupy. 33 Noting that “In rationalized Western societies, becoming ‘white’ and male seems to depend upon the remanding of enjoyment, the body, an aptitude for pleasure,” Lott elaborates upon the intriguing assertion that arrested adolescence is “largely the condition to which dominant codes of masculinity aspire.” If white, (and I would add heterosexual and adult) masculinity is dependent upon the remanding of enjoyment and the displacement of white desires onto the other “who is always putatively ‘excessive’ in this respect, whether through exotic food, strange and noisy music, outlandish bodily exhibitions, or unremitting sexual appetite,” then “ascribing this excess to the ‘degraded’ other and indulging it—by imagining, incorporating, or impersonating the other—one conveniently and surreptitiously takes and disavows pleasure at one and the same time.” 34 In its presentation of a group of slackers who refuse the imperative to grow up by wallowing in the decadence offered by extended adolescence—through the pleasures of drug use, the recklessness of their playful gladiatorial combat, and the exhilaration that 33 Ibid 479-480. 34 Ibid 482. 138 accompanies the twists, turns, and plummets of the rollercoaster in the opening credits— Knocked Up at times uses linguistic, sonic, and material signifiers of blackness as understood through a white racial imaginary as the means by which it represents its characters’ arrested development. In addition to the juxtaposition of the slackers’ mock gladiatorial games with Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s rap, their use of marijuana adds yet another level of racial association to the representation of their extended adolescence. Historically associated with black musicians (we might recall here the “reefer addicts” who perform at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance in Back to the Future or, for a more contemporary example, ODB’s famously pot-obsessed Wu-Tang compatriot Method Man) and Mexican immigrants, its official criminalization was marked by the paranoid discourse of white racists who insisted that its use threatened white sexual and national purity with the risk of miscegenation and the increasing encroachment of Mexicans into the U.S. As Curtis Marez writes in Drug Wars, “a group of western states... successfully pressured the federal government to consider a national law, the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937.” Over a period of five days, hearings for the act were held, during which one line of testimony argued that “the drug... exaggerated or perverted the ‘natural’ characteristics of Mexicans, the primitive, impulsive, childish, and yet hardworking people imaginatively projected by employers and tourist promotions. The prodigious reserves of energy expended in acts of drug-induced violence supposedly subtracted from the sum of productive labor... the marijuana fiend became a deranged and useless farm or mining machine.” 35 If marijuana use resulted in the amplification of those characteristics deemed 35 Marez, Curtis. Drug Wars: The Political Economy of Narcotics. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 131-132 (emphasis mine). Marez also makes note of fears of racial mixture 139 “natural” among nonwhite people, its use among whites threatened to degrade whiteness, not only through the racial mixture attributed to its use that would dilute white purity but also marijuana’s association with white racial degeneration. By these logics, marijuana turns the white stoner into something resembling the racial other, marked by the impulsive, childish, and unproductive behaviors that are allegedly its effects. Although the criminalization of marijuana was directly related to racial anxieties regarding Mexican presence and entry into the country in the 1930s, the prolonged war on drugs has contributed significantly to the unprecedented and unparalleled incarceration of African Americans in the contemporary U.S. As a June 2013 report by the ACLU titled “The War on Marijuana in Black and White” indicates, African Americans are almost four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites, despite similar rates of usage. 36 Thus, while the masculinity of white stoners in slacker films is often associated with racialized masculinities—we might recall the pot dealer Jay from Kevin Smith’s Clerks (and every other Smith film in his “View Askewniverse”) who performs a hybrid blend of white heavy metal macho and a caricature of gangsta rap masculinity—their white privilege prevents them from suffering the same fate of incarceration as the black men they always already poorly emulate. In this way, the white male appropriation of racialized masculinities allows slackers to experiment with or incorporate aspects of “alternative” masculinities that are crucial to the depictions of their arrested development while simultaneously avoiding the very real associated with Chinese opium dens in the latter half of the 19th century. See also: Cohen, Michael M. "Jim Crow's Drug War: Race, Coca Cola, and the Southern Origins of Drug Prohibition." Southern Cultures, Vol. 12, Num. 3 (Fall 2006): 55-79; Shah, Nayan. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown. Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press, 2001. 36 American Civil Liberties Union. "The War on Marijuana in Black and White: Billions of Dollars Wasted on Racially Biased Arrests." June 2013. < https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/aclu-thewaronmarijuana- rel2.pdf> 140 dangers and risks that non-white men experience. In Knocked Up, the slacker’s emergence into normative adulthood is marked, in part, by a transitional phase in which he puts “on the mask of a group that must remain immobile, unassimilable, and fixed at the bottom.” 37 While the opening credits sequence of Knocked Up juxtaposes the childish activities of its slackers with black masculinity via rap and pot smoking as a means of establishing their extended adolescence, the “exaggerated and parodic forms of hip hop hyper-masculinity” referenced by Alberti resurface as the means by which Ben expresses an uncharacteristic assertiveness. After finding Alison relaxing in the bathtub, Ben is asked to call her obstetrician to ensure his presence at the hospital upon their arrival. Unable to reach him due to his attendance of a bar mitzvah in San Francisco, Seth leaves the doctor an angry voicemail, invoking the intense emotionality associated with blackness while simultaneously expressing it through a reductive imitation of gangsta rap vernacular: “I’m going to have to kill you. I’m going to have to pop a fucking cap in your ass. You’re dead! You’re Tupac! You are fucking Biggie, you piece of shit!... Peace, fucker!” Resulting from his obviously limited knowledge of black masculinity and culture, Ben’s performance of a parodic black hyper-masculinity uses linguistic violence and intimidation as the means by which he tries to assert his masculine power. This differs significantly from what Robin Kelley identifies as gangsta rap’s signifying practices which utilize “Exaggerated and invented boasts of criminal acts” and violence as part of “verbal duels over who is the ‘baddest motherfucker around.’ They are not meant as literal descriptions of violence and aggression, but connote the playful use of 37 Rogin, Michael. "Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds His Voice." Critical Inquiry, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Spring 1992): 431 141 language itself.” 38 In his examination of gangsta rap’s expressions of violence in relation to black masculinity, Kelley regularly notes that rappers are inhabiting characters rather than giving expression to their desire to commit violence (though he is also careful to recognize and denounce the misogyny and violence against women depicted in the lyrics of gangsta rap and committed by its artists), linking the performance of these “characters” to gender performativity. In this instance, Ben appropriates and performs “black” masculinity as a means of ineffectively asserting “masculinity-power-aggression-violence as part of [his] own developing male identit[y].” 39 The problematic nature of Ben’s performance of this caricature of black masculinity is largely disarmed and glossed over as a result of the inefficacy of his effort, rendering the scene comic as he isn’t even able to express his frustrations directly but must do so through the awkwardly one-sided conversation with a voicemail service: this is not a failure of black masculinity, but represents Ben’s failure and inability to effectively perform it. Recalling an earlier scene in which Ben and his male friends express their enthusiasm for what they characterize as the violent, aggressive, and heroic masculinity of Eric Bana’s character in Steven Spielberg’s Munich (2005), Ben’s appropriation of a fantasy image of black gangsta masculinity is linked to what he and his friends see as an ideal and attractive model of Jewish manliness. Sitting around a table at a nightclub, Ben mentions that he has recently watched Munich which elicits excitement, particularly from Jay (Jay Baruchel), Jason (Jason Segel), and Jonah (Jonah Hill), all of whom, like Ben, are Jews. Ben states, “That movie was Eric Bana kicking fucking ass. Dude, every movie with Jews, we’re the ones getting killed, but Munich flips it on its ear. We’re capping 38 Kelley, Robin D.G. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. New York: The Free Press, 1996. 190. 39 Ibid 198. 142 motherfuckers... If any of us get laid tonight it’s because of Eric Bana.” Equating filmic representations of Jewish victimization with emasculation—an emasculation that he links to sexual inadequacy if not impotence—and contrasting it with Bana’s ass-kicking Mossad assassin whom, if any of them get laid, deserves credit for flipping the usual masculine script and restoring virility to Jewish men, Ben reduces the film’s plot to one in which Jews are “capping motherfuckers,” and conflates the heroic masculinity he sees in Bana’s character with a reductive model of gangsta rap manliness, equating virility with violence. While the emasculation of Jews has played a significant role in their historical oppression, to suggest that Ben and his friends’ masculinities are informed by the same anti-Semitic discourse used to justify Jewish marginalization and genocide in the 19th and 20th centuries would be a stretch. Although Ben’s oversimplification of Bana’s role in Munich as a hero who “caps motherfuckers” in the name of country recalls the “gender revolution that called for European Jews to shed their perceived effeminate characteristics and become more masculine as part of the creation of a renewed Jewish nation in Palestine” that, as Peleg Yaron notes, played an important role in early Zionist efforts to “fight against popular antisemitic characterizations,” the slacker masculinity of Ben and his friends is informed by contemporary understandings of the schlemiel more so than anti-Semitic renderings of the effeminacy of Jews. 40 40 Peleg, Yaron. "Heroic Conduct: Homoeroticism and the Creation of Modern Jewish Masculinities." Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society, New Series, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Autumn 2006): 31. John Stratton notes in Coming Out Jewish: Constructing Ambivalent Identities that the naturalization of the schlemiel into an American figure in film and popular culture in the 20th century, perhaps most notably in the films of Woody Allen and the stand-up comedy of Lenny Bruce, transformed "the schlemiel from a construction of a subaltern group, expressing the fears and survival tactics of that group, to membership of the dominant cultural order" (271). Coming Out Jewish: Constructing Ambivalent Identities. London: Routledge, 2000. 143 In “Enter the Schlemiel: The Emergence of Inadequate or Incompetent Masculinities in Recent Film and Television,” David Buchbinder explains that the schlemiel is typically represented as hapless... and as hopeless—both in the sense that he appears to have no appreciable future except an ongoing repetition or looping of the same sort of events. That is, the schlemiel figure fails at some level to meet the performance and attitudinal requirements of traditional masculinity: despite his desire and efforts to the contrary, the schlemiel may be physically awkward and socially inept, he may lack the ambition and competitive drive that characterizes many ‘proper’ men and so on. 41 For Buchbinder, the schlemiel figure “is the inadequately and incompetently masculine male,” whose increasing centrality in popular and independent film alike, particularly in comedy, is reflective of the social, cultural, and economic changes that have rendered traditional patriarchal masculinity an increasingly difficult ideal to live up to. 42 Within the context of comedies, whose narrative structures often involve the resolution of the conflict that sets the narrative in motion, the schlemiel benefits from “the rewards of normative, ‘proper’ masculinity... even though he has not demonstrated his competence at such masculinity.” 43 In other words, the schlemiel gets the girl, gets the job, gets the 41 Buchbinder, David. "Enter the Schlemiel: The Emergence of Inadequate or Incompetent Masculinities in Recent Film and Television." Canadian Review of American Studies, Vol. 38, No. 2 (2008): 230. For more on the schlemiel, see: Wisse, Ruth R. The Schlemiel as Modern Hero. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1971. 42 Buchbinder writes that young men "have grown up in a cultural, discursive and ideological context that, while it continues to foreground traditional patriarchal masculinity and its practices as the ideal to which men must conform and for which they must strive, at the same time has made it largely impossible, or at any rate very difficult, for men—especially young men—to do so. Social changes around the position of women make it hard for young men to behave without comment and criticism as their grandfathers and great-grandfathers did; employment has reconfigured itself in particular patterns that do not promote a conservative masculinity and, in any case, has tended to become scarcer and more transitory, making it more difficult for young men to define themselves in terms of a permanent job or profession (most young people today can expect to undergo at least three major changes in career in the course of their working lives); and late capitalism has encouraged behaviours—such as extravagant expenditure on luxury items, narcissistic concern with one's looks and body, and so on—that have traditionally been marked as feminine" (242). 43 Ibid 236. 144 friends or the social position he desires or comes to desire in spite of his failures to live up to the ideal of the traditionally patriarchal masculine male who has typically been the recipient of such rewards. While Buchbinder acknowledges the schlemiel’s origins in Jewish culture, his efforts to read the schlemiel as an “alternative” masculine type expand outward to include, by and large, the white nerds, geeks, dorks, and other awkward men of American comedy. 44 In Knocked Up (and other Apatow and Apatow-inspired movies), the schlemiel’s Jewishness is restored in ways that partially inform both his arrested adolescence and the resolution of the comedic narrative that results in his transition into adulthood. The absence of Alison’s doctor due to his attendance of a bar mitzvah is not merely a passing, throwaway reference, but becomes the means by which the film represents Ben’s passage from extended adolescence into adulthood. In a particularly revealing scene that informs Ben’s later accession into adulthood, Ben is on the phone with his father (Harold Ramis) after being dumped by Alison, and blames his dad for giving him poor fatherly advice: Ben: You screwed me, dad! You said that everything was going to be fine and nothing is fine. Nothing is fine! Ben’s Dad: Ben, I’ve been divorced three times, why would you listen to me? Ben: Because you were the only one giving me advice! And it was terrible advice! Ben’s Dad: You can go around blaming everyone else but in the end, until you take responsibility for yourself none of this is going to work out. Ben: I don’t know how to take responsibility for myself... I don’t know what to do! I’m an idiot! Tell me what to do! Ben’s Dad: I don’t know. I love ya, what can I tell ya? Ben: Just tell me what to do. 44 In this sense, Buchbinder both acknowledges the Jewish origins of the schlemiel while overlooking the significant impact of Jewish comedians, humorists, and film-makers in shaping American comedy, decontextualizing the "rise of the schlemiel" in American popular film and television from this history while simultaneously focusing much of his discussion on the films of Ben Stiller. 145 This final plea, delivered with a pathetic and sad desperation, recalls the passivity that Halberstam attributes to slacker men, who kick back, relax, and wait for their girlfriends or wives to tell them what to do. But in the absence of an assertive romantic partner, Ben is left with only his father—a poor substitute—whose lack of paternal wisdom and dispensing of “terrible advice” is the product of his own failure to live up to the heteronormative ideal of marital longevity as indicated by his own admission that he’s “been divorced three times,” reproducing the common theme of paternal failure in discussions of the crisis of masculinity. While his father’s suggestion that Ben take personal responsibility might, on the surface, seem like decent advice at the very least, Ben’s response, “I don’t know how,” reveals Ben’s irresponsibility and, more tellingly, his inability to even comprehend how not to be. The mirroring of this response in his dad’s own admission that he doesn’t know what Ben should do or just how Ben is supposed to take responsibility for himself leaves both at an impasse; development is arrested as the father is unable to help usher his son into manhood. And yet the advice to take responsibility for oneself reemerges during the bathtub scene with Alison. Following his threatening voicemail tirade, in which his rage becomes the affective and physical embodiment of “blaming everyone else,” Ben quietly re-enters the bathroom to update Alison. Trying to break the bad news about the doctor’s absence as calmly as possible, Ben quickly explains that a bar mitzvah is “a Jewish rite of passage.” The doctor’s absence thus becomes the movie’s means of representing Ben’s own rite of passage from childhood, expressed in his admission that “I don’t know how to take responsibility for myself,” into an adulthood marked by his acceptance of personal moral and ethical responsibility, depicted in his acceptance of fatherly responsibility (his mastery of the 146 baby books) and taking responsibility for Alison’s care; this moment serves as Ben’s informal and largely symbolic bar mitzvah, albeit ten years later than usual. The personal moral and ethical responsibility that Ben accepts in the final act of Knocked Up ultimately proves to represent his transition into adulthood as a reintegration into a normative, white, neoliberal moral and social order. While the brief reference to a bar mitzvah is intended to signal Ben’s own rite of passage into adulthood, it serves largely as a metaphor, as his personal responsibility is expressed exclusively in his decision to become a good husband and father; his responsibility is to his new nuclear family. As Meg Luxton writes in “Doing Neoliberalism,” “Central to [neoliberal privatization] are the claims that individuals and their families should take more responsibility for their own care.” 45 As part of this privatization that emphasizes the nuclear family, familial and personal ties constitute the spheres of support and care most encouraged by neoliberal ideology. Knocked Up takes this one step further: throughout the film Alison is dependent upon her sister’s financial and emotional support (she buys Alison a crib and other baby-related items and has been providing her with a place to stay even before the pregnancy), but in the end, when Debbie insists upon being present for the baby’s birth, Ben banishes her from the room, an act that leads Debbie to ultimately conclude: “I guess it’s good, right? He said he’s gonna take care of her. He really seems on his game. I think he’s going to be a good dad. I think I like him! Thank God.” While it is obvious that part of her relief derives from her realization that Ben, whom Debbie has been harshly skeptical of throughout the movie, is “going to be a good dad,” it also signals her relief regarding the alleviation of her responsibilities for Alison: now that Ben 45 Luxton, Meg. "Doing Neoliberalism: Perverse Individualism in Personal Life." Neoliberalism and Everyday Life. Eds. Susan Braedley and Meg Luxton. Quebec: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010: 163. 147 “really seems on his game,” Debbie can fully recommit herself to the role of mother and wife in her own nuclear family. In addition to the emergence of the slacker from extended adolescence into adulthood through his entry into heterosexual monogamy and gainful employment, the film suggests that adulthood for both Alison and Ben is marked by an entry into the nuclear family and their departure, for the most part, from a relationship of dependence on those outside of that unit. Ben’s transition into adulthood is represented as development, as progress, while Alison’s is marked only by the exchange of one relationship of dependence for another as she finally leaves the family home and into one that Ben provides: the crisis of masculinity is resolved as traditional gender roles are restored. Bromosociality and the Return to Adolescence Just before Alison gives birth to her baby, the suggestively named Dr. Kuni (Ken Jeong) becomes frustrated with Alison’s insistence on having a natural birth despite last minute complications. Impatient and unwilling to hear Alison’s concerns about the use of drugs, he tells Alison, “Fine, do what you want to do... You be the doctor!” When Ben meets him in the hallway, the doctor says of Alison, “That woman is a control freak and she needs to let go and let me do my job.” It is only after Ben begs the doctor to be “nice to her,” followed by the clearly audible and stress-induced grumbling of Ben’s stomach, that Dr. Kuni apologizes. To emphasize that Kuni’s change of heart has nothing to do with Alison and everything to do with male solidarity, he tells Ben: “This is healthy. This is good. I think we’re bonding.” Although Ben has clearly pulled the doctor aside in order to admonish him for his insensitivity and demand that Alison be treated with care and respect, Kuni’s change of heart is informed by a sense of camaraderie between men, a 148 camaraderie forged in response to his frustrations with the soon-to-be mother and his concerns regarding Ben’s physical and emotional well-being. That Alison’s health seems to be a secondary concern for the doctor in this moment reveals the ways in which male bonding in films like Knocked Up often come at the expense of negative representations of women. Indeed, throughout the film, the “bromance”—a term used to describe close friendships between straight men that, at times, exhibits traits commonly associated with romantic love—between Pete and Ben is portrayed as developing out of a mutual sense of frustration with their respective relationships to women. As Knocked Up reveals, the slacker rom-com is not, for the most part, about the fulfillment of fantasies of escape from work and “adult” responsibility, but about the dissolution of such fantasies as the slacker-as-extended-adolescent comes of age. Of course, this doesn’t mean that adulthood is no longer informed by such fantasies, and Knocked Up and similar films often portray the miseries of adulthood in their male characters as stemming from their continued longing for a return to the “freedoms” associated with adolescence: freedom from the very things they have to sacrifice in order to become mature adults. Meanwhile, the miseries of women are regularly depicted as resulting from the impossible demands they have placed on themselves and others. To quote Sarah Ahmed, “By implication, it is feminism that gives women the desires that have made them unhappy.” 46 Following the theatrical release of Knocked Up, Katherine Heigl told Vanity Fair that the movie “was a little sexist,” adding that “It paints the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight, and it paints men as lovable, goofy, fun- loving guys. It exaggerated the characters, and I had a hard time with it on some days. 46 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 53. 149 I’m playing such a bitch; why is she being such a killyjoy? Why is this how you’re portraying women?” 47 While Knocked Up certainly has moments in which the hypocrisy of its male characters’ fantasies for a return to adolescence is exposed, its portrayal of women as successful, hard working buzzkills who demand that the slacker grow up, get a job, and become the kind of man worthy of marriage, baby-making, and fatherhood, is reflective of a distinctly male resentment underlying the representation of women as, in Meltzer’s words, “agents of growing up and getting a grip... two things that could harsh any slacker’s mellow.” The following conversation between Debbie and Alison exemplifies Meltzer’s assessment of the uneven and harsh portrayal of women in many slacker films: Debbie: You need to train him. Oprah said that when two people meet they are forced to point out each other’s differences and flaws. Alison: I thought you were supposed to just accept people for who they are and love them anyway. Debbie: You criticize them a lot and then they get so down on themselves that they’re forced to change. Alison: Really? You don’t think that would just make it worse? That would just be, like, naggy. Debbie: And then in the end they thank you for it. Although Alison’s responses are meant to serve as the voice of reason in the face of her sister’s sadistic views on marriage, they do almost nothing to undermine both the negative portrayal of Debbie in this scene or throughout the movie. In fact, Debbie’s conclusion that “in the end they thank you for it” couldn’t be more wrong, as Pete regularly uses his job as a music talent scout as an excuse to leave the house at odd hours, allowing him to temporarily escape from the confines of marriage and home in order to enjoy time with his male friends. This only fuels Debbie’s paranoia as she installs 47 Bennetts, Leslie. "Heigl's Anatomy." Vanity Fair. Jan. 2008. <http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/ features/2008/01/heigl200801>. 150 spyware on his computer and follows him after he leaves home at night, suspecting him of having an affair. When it is finally revealed that he has been leaving the house to hang out with his bros, Pete says, “It’s a fantasy baseball draft. It’s not like I’m cheating or anything.” Debbie responds, “No! This is worse!... This is you wanting to be with your friends more than your family.” After an extended conversation during which Pete’s various transgressions—his fantasy baseball league, going to see Spider-Man 3 alone— are exposed, Debbie tells him that she no longer wants him at the house, beginning a brief separation. Debbie’s anger toward Pete is certainly understandable and justified, identifying a fundamental inequality in their relationship: while Pete escapes from his wife and children in order to “keep his sanity a little bit,” Debbie is unable to even entertain such fantasies as Pete’s nocturnal departures burden her with greater responsibility and confine her to the home. And the film asks us to sympathize with her in this moment. But in the next scene, as Alison kicks Ben out of her car in the middle of the street for supporting Pete on the issue, what the film portrays as Alison’s hormonal overreaction quickly undermines the sympathy that we are meant to feel for Debbie, and her demonization throughout the movie only further emphasizes the degree to which the film portrays her as largely unsympathetic. Ben’s calm attempt to be “reasonable,” explaining that “when you’re a guy and you have a family and you have responsibility, you lose that male camaraderie and I get that. I totally understand where he’s coming from,” provides a stark contrast to Alison’s angry demand, “You should just support me! You should just support everything I say!” 151 It is particularly telling that while Ben and Pete have friends, Debbie and Alison only have each other; this not only informs the women’s lack of sympathy for their respective men (how could they possibly understand when they have no close friends outside of family?), but more importantly emphasizes the importance of male homosocial bonds (Ben’s “male camaraderie”) over those of women—a common theme in the bromance genre. In “Caught in a Bad Bromance,” Elizabeth J. Chen reminds us that “Bromances exceptionalize male friendship, while female friendship is given no social significance.” 48 After being kicked out of Debbie’s car, and after yet another argument at the gynecologist’s office, the movie cuts to a bar where Pete and Ben are drinking beers and Ben describes the endless “list of shit that Alison doesn’t let me do,” pointing toward his feelings regarding the disparity between the prohibitions she places on him and the complete lack of expectations that he has of her. In response, Pete offers a morose observation about marriage: “Marriage is like an unfunny, tense version of Everybody Loves Raymond, but it doesn’t last twenty two minutes, it lasts forever.” If heterosexual romance is defined by prohibition and the gendered inequality of expectations, these characters seem to believe, then male homosociality provides an escape, however temporary, from the restrictive covenant of heterosexual marriage and monogamy: within the limited and limiting framework of heteronormativity, alternatives to marriage are impossible to conceive and homosocial bonds provide the only means of escape. 48 Chen, Elizabeth J. "Caught in a Bad Bromance." Texas Journal of Women and the Law, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Spring 2012): 259. Here we might think of I Love You, Man (2009), which at first seems far more generous in its portrayal of women than Knocked Up, but ultimately reduces women's friendship to stereotypes: their interactions and intimacy revolve primarily around gossip. This works to emphasize the importance of the friendship between the two central characters Peter Klaven and Sydney Fife, in the exemplary final scene in the movie, as Peter stands at the alter with his bride Zooey, it is not their marriage vows that are foregrounded, but Peter and Sydney's expressions of manly, hetero-love for one another that takes center stage. In fact, the camera pans out as the ceremony begins, and the words of the wedding officiant and Peter and Zooey become increasingly inaudible as the camera backs further away from them. 152 It is largely, though not exclusively, in this context that we have witnessed the rise of the “bromance” in contemporary film and television. A homosocial variation on the traditional romantic comedy, these films are not simply about male friendship but the love shared between heterosexual men. While some have noted that bromantic comedies reveal the anxieties “over the possible obsolescence of conventional constructions of masculinity within the logic of the romantic comedy,” the increasing attention paid to real-life bromances in the media, beginning with a 2005 New York Times article by Jennifer 8. Lee titled “The Man Date,” suggests that the bromance must be understood beyond the confines of the romantic comedy. 49 Indeed, even in film and television the bromance is an extension of, and informed by the broader genre of the “buddy movie,” including action films, which continue to rely upon traditional cinematic models of muscular masculinity while simultaneously representing the friendships between manly men in ways that mirror typical representations of marital relationships: we watch as gun- toting, muscular dudes fuss over each other and argue about where they’ll go out to dinner after work; there is often one that is “laid back” and another that is “naggy” and “uptight” (think Steve McGarrett and Danny “Danno” Williams on the remake of Hawaii Five-0); they bear their souls to one another as one cries and the other earnestly comforts; and when they are on the phone with one another, there may be a moment when someone asks if they’re talking to their wives. 50 The bromance, as it has evolved in the past few 49 Alberti 171. Emphasis mine. 50 In an episode of Hawaii Five-0, Danny and Steve have the following phone conversation: Danny: You, uh, you miss me, don’t you. Steve: Oh, yeah, I wish you were here, but you don’t swim, do you. Danny: I don’t swim? I swim. Very well, actually, I just choose not to. Steve: Yeah, yeah yeah. Ed: You talking to your wife? Steve: I’m talking to my partner. "Ho'apono." Hawaii Five-0. CBS. 1 Nov. 2010. 153 years, has become less about anxieties regarding the potential obsolescence of conventional constructions of masculinity so much as the infusion of emotional sensitivity into these constructions. And we are often meant to accept this wholesale as a sign of progress. In “Faux Friendship,” William Deresiewicz, nostalgically bemoaning the demise of “classical” models of friendship—exemplified by Achilles and Patroclus (which he notes with some disdain has been corrupted by efforts to rewrite “historical friendships... as sexual”), Byron and Shelley, Goethe and Schiller, Emerson and Thoreau—writes that “For all the talk of ‘bromance’ lately (or ‘man dates’), the term is yet another device to manage the sexual anxiety kicked up by straight-male friendships—whether in the friends themselves or in the people around them—and the typical bromance plot instructs the callow bonds of youth to give way to mature heterosexual relationships. At best, intense friendships are something we’re expected to grow out of.” 51 I will return to the idea of bromance as a means of managing sexual anxiety stemming from straight male friendships momentarily, but Deresiewicz’s comment regarding the typical bromance plot in which “the callow bonds of youth... give way to mature heterosexual relationships” is notable, and can be seen in a range of bromances in films including Knocked Up, in which Ben’s decision to get his life together involves moving out of the house he shares with his pot-smoking, perpetually adolescent buddies, and by dating advice columns on “How to Get Your Boyfriend Out of a Bromance,” in which women are told that “If your guy won’t give his bromance a rest and make your relationship a priority, he’s too 51 Deresiewicz, William. "Faux Friendship." The Chronicle of Higher Education. 6 Dec. 2009. <https://chronicle.com/article/Faux-Friendship/49308/>. 154 immature for romance.” But these developmental logics applied to the bromance require some exploration and complication. 52 The fledgling bromance between Ben and Pete in Knocked Up provides us with a starting point for exploring the function of homosocial bonds with regard to the relationship between adolescence and adulthood. In one scene, Ben, Alison, Pete, and Debbie are having dinner together when Pete asks, “Isn’t it weird though that when you have a kid all your dreams and hopes just go right out the window?” to which Ben nods and touches his nose in agreement. Debbie, perturbed, asks in response, “What changed for you? What went out the window? What plans? You do everything exactly the same.” As Pete explains, marriage and children result in the inability to pursue certain activities and “dreams” due to the increasing demands they place on ones time, and the film represents Debbie and Alison as not only unwilling but unable to understand Pete’s position, becoming increasingly annoyed, like two mothers watching as their children misbehave in public. Ben does little to improve the situation as he, caught up in a sense of camaraderie with Pete, obnoxiously adds: I get what he’s talking about! Like, honestly, when I found out about [Alison’s pregnancy] I just totally like—I just had this flash of me in a white Ford Bronco, and I’m just hauling ass for Canada, man... and I bust through the border and I’m a free man! That’s all I kept thinking... Honestly, like if Doc Brown screeched up in front of you in the DeLorean... *ggssshhhh* opened the door and was like, “Hey, Allison. Come on! I’ve got the car here. What do you wanna do?” No part of your brain would have been like, ‘You know? Maybe we’ll go back to that night and I would maybe put a condom on Ben’s dick.’ You never got that flash? 52 See: Lewis, Melissa. "How to Get Your Boyfriend Out of a Bromance." match.com. NA. <http://datingtips.match.com/boyfriend-out-bromance-13197070.html>; Wood, Jillian. "How to break up a bromance." The loop. 13 Dec. 2013. <http://www.theloop.ca/living/love/love-bites/article/- /a/2989791/How-to-break-up-a-bromance>. 155 Ben’s monologue about Back to the Future offers an insight into the regret and nostalgia informing what is here presented as a distinctly male desire for escape from the confines of marriage and parenthood. Rather than suggest that this is, in fact, the case, it is important to note that this is a rather common trope in the film and deployed as a means of establishing the responsible adulthood inhabited by Debbie and Alison and the irresponsible adolescence that define Ben and, to a slightly lesser extent, Pete. As with the film’s treatment of the topic of abortion, which turns Alison’s decision to keep the baby into a heroic sacrifice that emphasizes her sense of adult responsibility, we are presented with a moment in which even the possibility of entertaining such fantasies on the part of the two women would make them bad mothers; revising their personal histories amounts to abortion. 53 In addition, Back to the Future serves as a vehicle for the film’s construction of the temporal dynamics of the bromance. That is, male homosociality and its slippage into adolescent forms of bonding offer an escape not only from marriage, but the adulthood and responsibility it represents. Growing more upset with each passing reference to Back to the Future, Debbie states, “I have a really good idea: why don’t the two of you get into your time machine, go back in time, and fuck each other?” There is no hesitation on the part of the two men to indulge in what amounts to a ridiculously adolescent flirtation, as Ben raises his glass of whiskey and responds, “This is my time machine!” Although we are quickly made aware that both men are “joking around,” Ben’s observation that Pete is a “funny motherfucker,” concludes with him earnestly saying, “Look at his face! I just want to kiss 53 As Slate's film critic Dana Stevens reminds us, not only is abortion "nonexistent... as an option," but the word itself "literally cannot be uttered—when Ben's pal Jonah briefly invokes the procedure, he says it 'rhymes with shmashmortion'." Stevens, Dana. "Unplanned Parenthood: What Knocked Up gets wrong about women." Slate. 31 May 2007. <http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2007/05/unplanned_parent hood.html>. 156 it. I think he’s cute.” Disgust comes not from either of the men but from the women as Ben and Pete, seemingly oblivious to the fact that their respective partners are annoyed, continue to compliment one another and engage, half seriously, in Debbie’s sarcastic suggestion. While Debbie’s suggestion that the men “fuck each other,” comes across as an overtly homophobic observation (and this is not the last time she expresses her anger through homophobia in the movie) meant to put an end to Pete and Ben’s mutual geeking out over Back to the Future via the incitement of homosexual panic, their indulgence in it is no less homophobic. As Eve Sedgwick reminds us in Between Men, homosocial bonds between heterosexual men “may, as in our society, be characterized by an intense homophobia, fear and hatred of homosexuality.” 54 Here, homophobia manifests as an underlying component to Ben and Pete’s joking flirtation; we might call this the “I’m secure in my (heterosexual) masculinity” school of homophobia, in which the parodying of gay intimacy is enabled by the rejection or denial of homosexual possibility. Pete and Ben are able to engage in this “sexual” flirtation precisely because they turn homosexuality into a joke rather than a serious consideration. And yet their laughter simultaneously indicates an underlying anxiety, an attempt to make light of a situation in order to reduce tension as Ben so often does during potentially volatile conversations with Alison. This tension is informed by a desire that is not necessarily sexual, but hints at what Sedgwick calls “male homosocial desire... the affective or social force, the glue, even when its manifestation is hostility or hatred or something less emotively charged, that shapes an important relationship.” Homophobia as a defense, as a means of 54 Sedgwick, Between Men, 1. 157 reinforcing and reassuring the heterosexuality of the subject, does not preclude the possibility of male homosocial desire but rather makes clear the “potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual—a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically disrupted.” 55 This visibility, since the time of Between Men, has become increasingly apparent and is made evident in bromance as a genre. As Alberti notes, “the obsession with gay sexuality and the mixture of homophobia and homophilia that runs throughout these movies... has given rise to the term ‘bromance’ itself.” 56 Deresiewicz is only partially correct when he says that, in the bromance plot, “the callow bonds of youth [must] give way to mature heterosexual relationships,” insofar as bromance also enables the adult to regress into adolescence. The desire to escape from the responsibilities associated with adulthood and into, especially for Pete, a temporary adolescence adds another dimension to the potentially “queer” nature of bromance. Robert Klein writes, “In the normal development of the little boy’s progress toward heterosexuality, he must pass... through the stage of the ‘positive’ Oedipus, a homoerotic identification with his father, a position of effeminized subordination to the father, as a condition of finding a model for his own heterosexual role... heterosexuality in the male... presupposes a homosexual phase as the condition of its normal possibility.” 57 While Klein’s formulation of Freud’s Oedipal schema involves “a complicated play of desire for and identification with the parent of each gender,” a regression into or extension of adolescence/childhood seems to be marked by a mutual identification that is not dependent upon an identification with a parent. And the typical relationship of “rivalry” 55 Ibid 1-2. Emphasis mine. 56 Alberti 168. 57 Quoted in Sedgwick, Between Men, 23. 158 over a woman is either replaced by the rivalry between a man and a woman over the object of their mutual affection, or the avoidance of such a rivalry altogether; after all, rivalry takes a lot of work. The homosocial bonds between young men in slacker films, for example, is often about deferring normative, developmental time indefinitely, a deferral made possible by a shared investment in slacking as well as an intimacy that serves as a substitute for heterosexual sex. In Pineapple Express (2008), we can see how this relationship plays out and understand the role that drugs, in this case, play in the performance of intimacy. Dale, a process server who spends a majority of his “working” day in the car listening to talk-radio, is told in the opening moments of the movie to “get a real job.” Saul, his drug dealer buddy (who traffics exclusively in marijuana), sits around his apartment and is told that he has “the best job in the world: you sit around and smoke weed all day.” Saul’s inactivity, enabled by his “employment” as a drug dealer which feeds his smoking habit, fits within the slacker “type” precisely because he doesn’t “work”; he doesn’t really do anything. The alliance that is forged between these two stoner-slackers couldn’t come at a more opportune time. Dale’s romantic difficulties with his high school girlfriend—who is, in fact, more mature than he is—are escalating toward the kind of normative, middle- class life that Dale-as-slacker is absolutely unfit for. An ongoing subplot of the film involves a dinner with his girlfriend’s parents that Dale is anxious about, if not completely dreading. As the film progresses, Dale realizes that his relationship is doomed, but the breakup ends with Dale’s rather unemotional realization that he “is a fuckup and doesn’t deserve to be dated by anyone.” Rather than sulk in self pity, Dale 159 finds himself supported by Saul’s friendship. The pleasure of smoking weed functions as one that can and does replace the pleasure of heterosexual sex in the film. While movies such as Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004) have made a point of playing with the homoerotics of smoking the phallic pipe, smoking weed in Pineapple Express requires no overt play on homoerotic signification. Smoking weed enables the characters to open up to each other, to share their feelings in a way that isn’t impeded by the anxiety, awkwardness, and discomfort produced by homophobia. In the final scene of the movie, tired, battered and, of course, stoned, Dale, Saul, and their friend Red sit in a diner and proceed to unabashedly confess their love for one another: Red: Seriously, I know this might sound weird, but could we be best friends? Just us, for real? Dale: I think we should all be best friends. Red: We should be. Saul: You guys are like, both of my best friends. And you didn’t even know it. But now you know it and we’ll all be best friends. Dale: You know what we should get? You know those hearts that break up and it says like, “Best Friends?” We should get like a three-way one of those. … Red: I kind of feel like something’s happening here. (excitedly) Was that a boner? Dale: Is that a condo? Is that us moving into an apartment together? Red: Us getting a time-share? While this scene is played for laughs, this shared moment of homosocial and homoerotic intimacy, when considered alongside the character’s extended adolescence, hints at the possibility of the characters’ lingering in that “homosexual phase” that is the condition of heterosexuality’s possibility. Blurring the lines between the homosocial, homoerotic, and homosexual that are so often rigidly policed and segmented by homophobia and the dictates of heternormativity, this scene reveals the “unbrokenness of a continuum 160 between homosocial and homosexual” that disrupts the oftentimes strict segregation of these categories. It is important to note that the valorization of homosocial bonds between straight, white men, regardless of their queer potentiality, often comes at the expense of misogyny, homophobia, and racism in bromance films. Indeed, Pineapple Express, despite its intriguing and unabashed depiction of homoeroticism (which makes the bromances in many other films look tame by comparison), features Asian Americans as racist caricatures who are regularly the butt of the movie’s jokes. The Korean American drug lords and their henchmen, referred to exclusively in the movie as “the Asians,” regularly slip back and forth between speaking Korean and a heavily accented English, and subtitles regularly change the entire meaning of what is actually being said or appear when English profanities are uttered with wildly and intentionally off-the-mark translations (at one point the drug kingpin says “Fuck your mama,” in thickly accented English, as subtitles read “Bring it on!”). Through the thick “Asian” accent and the intentional use of incorrectly interpreted subtitles, the film suggests that there is no distinction between thickly accented utterances of “Suck my balls!” and the Korean language itself: it all sounds “Asian” anyway. In an article for The New York Times titled “Giving the Last Laugh to Life’s Losers,” Jon Kasdan, who wrote an episode for the short-lived television series Freaks and Geeks (executive-produced by Judd Apatow), stated: The culture in the last 5, 10 years is one of shame and humiliation, and Judd [Apatow] gets that... Part of the experience of being a man in this postmodern life is humiliation, and wearing it as something to be proud of. 161 This is a true frustration that Judd is expressing in his work, almost a romanticized version of being a schlub. 58 While we should not mistake Kasdan’s assessment of white men’s humiliation and marginalization in the postmodern age for Apatow’s own views, it does provide some insight into matters of racial representation in his films and many of those he has inspired. As Latoya Peterson observes, “Apatow’s characters exist in a universe that is almost completely male and almost completely white,” a criticism that resonates with those most recently leveled against the Lena Dunham HBO comedy Girls (which Apatow produces), who has notably been the focus of a great deal of press coverage regarding the rise of the female slacker. 59 Informed not only by Kasdan’s comments but also the largely white-washed worlds represented in the Apatovian oeuvre, Peterson notes that “In Apatow’s movies we see an entire generation of white men who rely on each other for a sense of validation and understanding, a generation of men who in many ways by refusing to grow-up are able to avoid facing the reality of changing power structures in American society.” Arrested development, in films like Knocked Up and Pineapple Express, Peterson argues, “is presented as a solution to dealing with the frustration of being a ‘schlub.’” Although Knocked Up presents us with a less insidious vision of a world in which schlubby guys embrace their extended adolescence as a means of coping with a world in which they feel increasingly marginalized and powerless, Pineapple Express establishes its central 58 Waxman, Sharon. "Giving the Last Laugh to Life's Losers." The New York Times. 6 May 2007. <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/movies/moviesspecial/06waxm.html>. 59 Peterson, Latoya. "Judd Apatow and the Art of White Masculinity." Racialicious. 22 August 2008. <http://www.racialicious.com/2008/08/22/judd-apatow-and-the-art-of-white-masculinity/>. For more on Dunham-as-female-slacker, see: Hoby, Hermione. "The slacker is back—and this time she's female." The Guardian. 24 March 2012. <http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2012/mar/25/slacker-back-female-lena- dunham>; Henderson, J. Maureen. "She's No Seth Rogen In Stilettos: Tearing Down the Slacker Girl Stereotype." 4 April 2012. <http://www.forbes.com/sites/jmaureenhenderson/2012/04/04/shes-no-seth- rogen-in-stilettos-tearing-down-the-slacker-girl-stereotype/>. 162 action-movie conflict by positioning its slackers as the hapless underdogs in who have been unwittingly dragged into a gang war. In this context, the power of Asian drug lords serves not only as the reason for committing violence against them (masked in the action- movie logics of “self defense”), but provides the reasoning for their representation as racist caricatures who largely serve to deliver the film’s crudest jokes. In my next chapter, I discuss the Harold & Kumar films and explore the ways in which they not only overturn some of the conventions of what have largely been white, male dominated comedic genres, but also provide satirical critiques of white racism, the War on Drugs, and the War on Terror. 163 Chapter Four Winning the War on Drugs: Race, Assimilation, and Terror in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay In the end, however, the slacker’s reactionary impulses distort and override the inchoate idealism of his earlier withdrawal from the rat race of Western capitalism. Thus, what both authors anticipate with surprising absence of mind is a kind of maturation or cultural turn into the new millennium on the part of the so-called Blank or X Generation of the 1980s and 1990s, a turn from a vaunted disaffection with capitalist culture and its ‘ethic of duty’ to a resigned, if sometimes exuberant, acceptance of hegemonic conditions—conditions revealed through the experience of travel. For no matter what their original class status, Western slacker- travelers are always flattered by the appearance of imperial privilege that accrues to them as conspicuous consumers in non-Western settings where they are invited to play roles to which they are unaccustomed back home. —David Lehardy Sweet, “Absentminded Prolepsis: Global Slackers before the Age of Terror” The figure of the slacker needs to mean different things to different people at different times in order to serve its complex function as a goad to examining our relation to work, as a role to adopt while finding our relation to work, as a critique of our culture’s twisty relation to work and to leisure, and as a celebration of the same. —Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America As noted in my previous chapter, the arrested development of white stoners in slacker films may, at times, be represented through signifiers of non-white masculinities that have historically been associated with extended adolescence and criminalized drug use. Recreational drug use in these films has few, if any, consequences for white stoners, who are able to avoid the dangers and risks (such as incarceration) that non-white men experience. Of course, it would be all to easy to dismiss such a claim by suggesting that incarceration would introduce an element to such films, perhaps especially in the case of romantic comedies, that would kill the buzz. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle challenges this idea during a scene in which the titular characters find themselves locked- 164 up in a police station following Harold’s accidental assault on a police officer. Looking through the bars of their cell, they watch as the scraggly stereotype of a Phish-obsessed, white drug dealer (who also happens to be a student at Princeton), introduced earlier in the film, is released into his wealthy mother’s custody after being arrested for marijuana possession. Harold’s and Kumar’s African American cellmate whom, we are told, was arrested “for being black” and is later assaulted by police officers who ridiculously mistake a copy of Essays on Civil Disobedience for a gun, provides what should be a harrowing point of contrast that is rendered hilarious but nonetheless insightful in its commentary on white, upper class privilege and police brutality. The popular slacker-stoner comedy Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, and its sequel, provides us with an example of the ways in which the foregrounding of racial difference can not only upend the normative conventions of genre but provide a critique of the various privileges that enable the white, male, heterosexual slacker’s laziness, often represented “with surprising absence of mind,” in the films in which he appears. Although the slackers of Alex Garland’s The Beach and Michel Houellebecq’s Plateforme, David Lehardy Sweet argues, enjoy the imperial privileges bestowed upon them by virtue of their whiteness and the global mobility that race and class privilege enable, both Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and Escape from Guantanamo Bay adopt the conventions of the slacker film, stoner comedy, bromance, and the buddy travel movie as a means of critiquing the absent mindedness with which most films represent the white, male, heterosexual slacker and their privileged relation to the social world. On the surface, the Harold & Kumar movies seem to be yet another reiteration of the typical male stoner comedy, but what they offer, without much over-reading required, is an often 165 times irreverent and pointed critique of the conventions that define the vast majority of the genre films I discussed in Chapter Three while simultaneously offering pointed commentary regarding matters of race and racism in the contemporary U.S. My understanding of Harold & Kumar as slacker films derives not from an assumption that White Castle is ultimately a comedy about assimilation as so many critics have suggested. 60 That is, Harold and Kumar aren’t slackers because of their assimilation into “whiteness” as a category through which the slacker is defined. Arguing that “White Castle” is ultimately a metaphor for whiteness itself, the presumption of assimilation on the part of critics fails to account for the adamant refusal of Kumar, the film’s slacker protagonist, to accept the demands of a specifically white insistence for Americanization expressed in the film. In one scene, after Harold is confronted by a white police officer who gives him a ticket for jaywalking, Kumar’s name becomes the topic of the cop’s ridicule: “What kind of name is that anyhow,” he asks. “Kooo-mar. What is that, like, five o’s and two u’s? Whatever happened to good old American names like Dave or Jim, you know?” In response to this, Harold tries to get on the officer’s good side by stating his name aloud, to which the cop responds, “Harold. Now that’s a great name. You should be proud of that name, son.” Incensed, Harold rails against the police officer, accusing him of racism and the exorbitant fine he has dispensed: “Why don’t you just take this quiet little Asian guy with the Anglicized name that treats you so well and give him a couple other tickets!” While Harold’s attempt to use his self-identification as an appropriately assimilated subject, repeating his name as the means by which he aligns 60 See: Lim, Dennis. "Mining Post-9/11 America for Laughs." New York Times. 20 Apr. 2008. <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/movies/20lim.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0>; "Harold & Kumar Get the Munchies: Fast Food. High Times." Movie Gazette. NA. <http://movie-gazette.com/855/harold-and- kumar-go-to-white-castle>. 166 himself with the “good old American names like Dave or Jim,” Kumar’s anger suggests that he is by no means willing to acquiesce to white demands for Asian assimilation, countering the oftentimes all too common understanding of Asian Americans as successfully assimilated subjects. It is presumptuous to assume that assimilation is White Castle’s central theme, especially considering the ways in which other characters in the film regularly identify and ridicule both Harold and Kumar’s ethnicities. In its portrayal of the characters and the world they inhabit, White Castle, in fact, refuses the traditional narrative of Asian assimilation as the model minority, not by departing from it but by repeatedly reminding us that they are Asian. In Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe writes: Narratives of immigrant inclusion—stories of the Asian immigrant’s journey from foreign strangeness to assimilation and citizenship—may in turn attempt to produce cultural integration and its symbolization on the national political terrain. Yet these same narratives are driven by the repetition and return of episodes in which the Asian American, even as a citizen, continues to be located outside the cultural and racial boundaries of the nation. Rather than attesting to the absorption of cultural difference into the universality of the national political sphere as the ‘model minority’ stereotype would dictate, the Asian immigrant—at odds with the cultural, racial, and linguistic forms of the nation—emerges in a site that defers and displaces the temporality of assimilation. 61 Instead of insisting upon whiteness as the only means by which one can access the identity of “slacker,” Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle suggest that the slacker benefits from a particular relationship to race and class. That is, if the slacker emerged as a result of the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state, which saw a shift from state- based models of economic “dependence” to its privatization in the family, then the context of the middle and upper-middle class family is what ultimately informs the 61 Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1996. 6. 167 slacker’s idleness as a dependent based on the neoliberal logics that, in many ways, have helped to shape contemporary definitions and representations of the slacker. Of course, it is more complicated than this. Informed by the relationship that people of color have historically had to capitalism and labor, oftentimes representing a cheap labor force that eased the impact of declining profits during times of systemic crisis and capitalist economic development, Asian American families, for example, often insist upon their children’s eventual accession to the world of work despite the economic success they may have achieved. Of course, Kumar is an exception to this rule, despite his father’s ongoing insistence that he become a doctor. During a med school interview at the start of the film, Kumar explains to the interviewer that he has no interest in going to med school and that the only reason he is present at all is that his father will stop paying his rent if he suspects that Kumar is not making an effort at professionalization. Thus, his continued exploitation and dependence on his father’s income defines his role as the film’s slacker. But, to recall Knighton, “The ‘idleness’ of the wealthy urban gentleman... clearly signifies differently than the ‘idleness’ of the indigent and dissolute vagrant.” 62 If class, in Knighton’s example, provides an important signifying component of idleness, so too do the categories of race, gender, and sexuality, insofar as they have determined historical and contemporary understandings of relations to work and citizenship. As the epigraph above indicates, the ability for the slacker to “mean different things for different people at different times” can serve a “complex function as a goad to examining our relation to work, as a role to adopt while finding our relation to work, as a critique of our culture’s twisty relation to work and to leisure,” though I would not go quite so far as to suggest 62 Knighton, Idle Threats, 6. 168 that we “celebrate the same.” By foregrounding racial identity, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle is able to depict how racial difference informs different relations to work and leisure. Rather than a simple deployment of stereotypes such as the “hard-working Asian,” White Castle reproduces stereotypes as the means by which it reveals the complex relations between people of different races and ethnicities both in and out of the workplace and in relation to national belonging. That is, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle regularly disrupts the model minority myth, which casts Asian Americans as successfully assimilated subjects, oftentimes through discourses regarding the work ethic. Constantly deploying the tired tropes of various kinds of white dude comedies within the context of a stoner comedy, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle regularly disrupts the conventions that characterize these genres and provide pointed commentary on the ways in which these conventions often reaffirm and reify the marginalization of white men. Suck On This At the start of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, the narrative seems to be following the typical trajectory of comedies in which the sad white guy mourns a breakup and is saved by his fun-loving, hard-partying best friend. Sitting in his office, Billy (Ethan Embry) stares pathetically at a photo of his ex-girlfriend who dumped him six months prior. His friend J.D. walks into the office and insists that he forget about the girl by telling him, in what has by now been well established as a cinematic cliché, that “It’s time to move on.” Billy woefully responds, “Whatever. Even if I wanted to meet other women, I wouldn’t know what to do. I’ve been out of the game for so long.” The solution to this problem, J.D. proposes, is to “go out and get laid.” When Billy explains that he has to finish a report for a meeting the following day, J.D. asks, “Why don’t you get someone 169 else to do your work for you?” Cut to Harold, the film’s Korean American protagonist, who is interrupted by Billy and J.D. just as he is about to leave work for the day. “We need you to update those models for me,” Billy tells Harold. “It’s your responsibility now, big boy.” If, the movie ask us, in the cinematic worlds in which the sad white guy and his hard-partying best friend are required by their narratives to leave work behind in order to help resolve the misery and stagnation of post break-up single life, then who takes on the burden of his deferral of work as necessitated by his character arc? The office’s token hard-working Korean guy, of course. To drive this point home, J.D. tells Billy as they walk out of the building, “How do you think I get all my shit done? I’m telling you, those Asian guys love crunching numbers. You probably just made his weekend!” This line makes clear that when the white guy refuses to work, someone must make up for it. But rather than follow Billy and J.D. as they recover Billy’s manhood in an adventure where he faces the trials and tribulations of trying to get laid and ultimately emerges victorious by finding the girl of his dreams, the movie follows Harold as he stares, frustrated, out of the window of his office building, and watches as the liberated white dudes drive off in their convertible and into an evening of hard drinking and sexual conquest. “Fuck,” which is stated with both frustration and resignation, is Harold’s only response. We already know where Billy and J.D. are headed because we’ve already seen this movie so many times before: Billy and J.D. will go out clubbing, where Billy’s “emotional sensitivity” will both appeal to but ultimately thwart his own attempts to find a romantic connection. J.D’s confidence will be exposed as compensation for his own insecurities. Billy will run into his ex and we’ll discover the reasons for their breakup 170 which will inevitably require a misogynistic portrayal of her as an overbearing bitch in order to assure both Billy and the audience that Billy is better off. Homoerotic hijinks will ensue and homophobia will rear its ugly head to reassert the stability and certainty of their heterosexuality, despite their heartfelt professions of love for one another. White Castle utilizes our understanding of the absolute certainty of this narrative trajectory and ultimately upends, while at times reproducing, many of these conventions. While White Castle participates in the reproduction of a similar narrative trajectory—Harold ultimately finds his self-confidence and gets the girl, though this too is thwarted by her departure to Amsterdam, which leads into the plot of the sequel—the emphasis it places on the titular characters’ journey to White Castle, and its relegation of a romantic subplot to the margins of the film, shifts the focus away from the typical narrative of oedipal acculturation and towards a nearly plotless series of random and silly vignettes that put a critical spin on various comedic tropes and genres (“gross-out” humor, the stoner comedy, the sex comedy, the buddy travel film, and so on) that expose the reliance of generic and mass-produced, male-centered comedies upon racism, homophobia, and misogyny as the means by which laughs are generated and normative identities are reified. During a brief visit to their alma mater, Princeton University, Kumar runs into two attractive women who see him buy marijuana from previously mentioned white, freshman drug-dealer. When Kumar suggestively asks them if they’d be interested in “having a smoke, maybe have a little fun,” they agree, give him their room number, and Kumar quickly runs off in search of Harold. Finding his uptight friend, Kumar excitedly informs him that “There are these two filthy pussies just aching to get boned by us!” 171 Kumar’s reduction of the two women to sex objects is almost immediately thwarted by a scene of scatological horror, as Harold and Kumar, hiding from a campus security guard who catches them smoking in a stairwell, find themselves in a stall in a women’s restroom. Just as they are about to leave after the guard has come and gone, the two women enter the restroom, who are discussing their breasts and enhancing their cleavage in anticipation of reuniting with Kumar. Unaware of Harold and Kumar’s presence, one of them says, “Hurry up. I really want to go smoke weed with that dishy Indian guy,” which piques Kumar’s interest. Her friend replies, “Just a minute, I’m about to have the worst case of taco shits,” and enters one of the empty stalls. Moments later, her friend occupies the stall to the other side of Harold and Kumar, and the two men suddenly find themselves in the middle of a game of “battle shits,” as the two women begin to one-up each other in a scatological dialogue, to Harold and Kumar’s horror and dismay. Rather than reading this scene as misogynistic, it is important to understand how it serves as a disruption of Kumar’s idealization of their femininity which informs his reduction of them to sex objects, to “two filthy pussies just aching to get boned,” as it diverts his attention to the diarrheal anus. The women’s playfulness and excitement during this scene suggests an ambivalence in the film’s representation, expressed in Harold and Kumar’s disgust and the women’s enjoyment. While, as Susan C. Boyd notes, that this marks the potential failure of the film's critical narrative, “the sexualized representation of women in the film is turned on its head” during this scene, similar to the by now infamous “birthing scene” from Knocked Up, as “the object of desire is grossly humanized.” 63 63 Boyd, Susan C. Hooked: Drug War Films in Britain, Canada, and the U.S. New York: Routledge, 2008. 183. 172 Reading this scene alongside the opening moments of Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, in which Harold’s daydream about his love interest Maria as he takes a shower is suddenly disrupted by the sound of Kumar defecating, Harold’s disgust with Kumar registers as even greater than the disgust expressed by the stoner duo in the first film. Instead of registering as homophobia, the disgust is entirely bodily, as Kumar explains, “Dude, we just ate thirty burgers,” referring to the conclusion of White Castle during which their consumption of sliders and french fries plays out like an erotic, if not Figure 15. Sliders. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. New Line, 2004. sexual exchange. When Kumar explains this, Harold’s disgust turns to understanding rather than rage, suggesting that the overt eroticism associated with the meal is remembered as a positive rather than a negative experience. To emphasize this point, there is a moment when, whilst getting high in their apartment, Harold observes that Sixteen Candles is playing on cable. His excitement is met with Kumar’s predictable response, “And the award for the least heterosexual statement ever made in this apartment goes to... Harold Lee, everybody!” Harold’s assessment of the film is telling: 173 “It’s a classic! It’s a very beautiful story about someone who feels unnoticed, unappreciated, unloved.” Pairing this comment with Kumar’s sing-song declaration, “Homo!” aligns Harold’s identification with Sixteen Candles as an identification with homosexuality, of course, the movie later turns this into a means by which the similarities in taste between Harold and Maria are taken to be a sign of their heterosexual compatibility. In a scene immediately following Harold’s expression of love for Sixteen Candles as a potentially queer story about marginalization, Harold and Kumar’s stoner neighbors note, “I think Kumar’s a fagel,” and “They’re definitely gay for each other,” just before one of them asks, “Hey, you wanna suck on this?” in reference to a pipe which the question’s recipient sucks enthusiastically. Figure 16. "Suck on this." Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. New Line, 2004. While homophobia, as in many slacker comedies and bromances, regularly emerges as a means of reasserting and reassuring the heterosexuality of Harold & Kumar’s protagonists, the homophobia directed towards them, not only in the casual remarks of their stoner neighbors but in the aggressive insults hurled at them by a group 174 of “eXtreme,” racist white dudes, forces us to consider the "simultaneous racialization and gendering of the Asian American male subject. That is, for Asian American men, racial identity was—and continues to be—produced, stabilized, and secured through mechanisms of gendering." 64 That this simultaneous racialization and gendering has historically been informed by the types of work with which Asian American male immigrants have been associated, not only directs our attention to how contemporary understandings of Asian American masculinity are informed by "a material legacy of the intersectionality of gender and race," but also the important role that work serves in such processes. 65 As David Eng argues, in addition to the simultaneous racialization and gendering of Asian American men, both the geographic segregation of Chinese immigrants in the U.S. as well as the legal limitations imposed on immigration into the U.S. resulted in the formation of bachelor communities who were "institutionally barred from normative (hetero)sexual reproduction, nuclear family formations, and entitlements to community" that rendered them "queer." 66 As "discourses on deviant sexuality" came to "describe and encompass a far larger Asian American constituency," the importance of understanding the queer dimensions of Asian American racialization cannot be overlooked. 67 While this might suggest that the function of homophobia in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle is to reassert Asian American heterosexual masculinity in an effort to combat the historical emasculation of Asian American men, the characters’ ultimately seem to embrace, in however limited a fashion, their “queerness.” That marijuana use 64 Eng, David. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2001.16. 65 Ibid 17. 66 Ibid 18. 67 Ibid. 175 enables these queer moments provides a direct link back to labor. Just before Billy and J.D. transfer their responsibilities onto Harold, we are told that the evening’s plans were for Harold and Kumar to get high and do nothing. Deferring work to the future and embracing a toke in the present, Harold accepts pleasure-seeking over labor, reflecting Christine Balance’s observations regarding drug use as generating “those moments of intimacy and scenes of belonging that capitalist production seeks to immobilize and even kill.” 68 In a particularly poignant scene from White Castle, Harold & Kumar are driving in a car that they’ve just stolen from a group of eXtreme, homophobic, racist white dudes, only to realize that the dudes may not be as eXtreme as their performances of an excessively aggressive heterosexual masculinity is intended to convey. Listening to a mix CD of what might stereotypically be identified as “gay” music (an assumption that is dependent upon a variety of factors, one of which includes the rigidity of thinking about homosexuality via a gender inversion model), Harold and Kumar initially have the last laugh at the expense of the eXtreme white dudes, whom they label as “gay” as a direct result of their taste in music. 69 But Harold and Kumar also get swept up into the affective attraction inherent in this “gay” music as, while listening to Wilson Phillips’ “Hold On,” they begin to sing along, at first with some apprehension but finally with feeling. War on Drugs/War on Terror Although marijuana offers the potential for queer forms of intimacy in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, it holds very different and threatening implications in Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Deciding to travel to Amsterdam in pursuit of 68 Balance, Christine. "On Drugs: The Production of Queer Filipino America Through Intimate Acts of Belonging." Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. Vol. 16, Issue 2 (July 2006): 276. 69 See, for example, Judith Butler’s discussion of gender inversion models of homosexuality in the DSM IV in “Undiagnosing Gender,” Undoing Gender. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. 176 Maria, Harold and Kumar find themselves opposite an interrogation room table from Homeland Security agent Ron Fox following an ordeal aboard the plane, in which Kumar’s impatience to get high leads to the mistaken identification of a rather intricately constructed bong for a bomb, Harold tries to explain that “My idiot friend here brought marijuana onto the plane,” in an attempt to set the record straight. Fox’s response, “I know your operation’s funded through drugs,” not only serves as a dismissal of Harold’s admission, but exposes the ways in which his confession only works to reinforce the agent’s unwavering belief in the stoner duo’s terrorist activities. This seemingly ridiculous moment in a film that many might view as mindless, stoner entertainment is actually rather insightful, as it exposes the very real conflation of the War on Terror with the War on Drugs by the US government. As one Hollywood feature film among many that have recently capitalized on the US War on Terror, Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay offers a uniquely biting critique of the misled and oftentimes racist government policies that have come to shape contemporary global geopolitics. In a series of public service announcements which aired between 2002 and 2003, US television audiences were told that “Drug Money Supports Terror. If you buy drugs you might too.” Capitalizing on the fears of an American public recently rocked by the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, the US War on Terror offered a window of opportunity to reinvigorate its War on Drugs. These PSAs, produced by the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, employ images of children as the victims of a terrorism funded by recreational drug use that both kills them and turns them into killers. As a child in one ad tells us: “I killed mothers. I killed fathers. I killed grandmas. I killed grandpas. I killed sons. I killed daughters. I killed firemen. I killed 177 policemen. Technically, I didn’t kill these people. I just kinda helped.” In another ad, a ghostly little girl tells a woman (and presumably us), “You killed me… they can’t do things like that without money.” Though many dismissed this particular ad campaign as ridiculous, the PSAs conveyed a perspective shared by influential members of the US government such as Illinois Republican Henry J. Hyde, Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on International Relations who noted in a 2005 hearing that “The U.S. Government has been AWOL too long in the fight against illicit drugs… which is part of the same war against the same enemy that is global terrorism.” 70 As the US War on Terror has proven to be a highly effective means of sustaining, reproducing, and expanding state power, the incorporation of the War on Drugs into its ever expanding ideological field is important to understand. As Curtis Marez notes in Drug Wars: The Political Economy of Narcotics, “Antidrug discourse has proven quite successful at gaining support for the state, making it difficult for politicians and others to challenge drug-war doxa.” 71 Marez’s statement, though exclusively concerned with the War on Drugs, is important to note here as the War on Terror itself has impacted “intimate details of subjectivity and social relations, serving as a formative, structuring context for ideas and practices concerning race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation” in new and increasingly complex ways. 72 How, precisely, has the conflation of the War on Drugs with the War on Terror made it difficult for people to challenge wartime doxa? One particularly useful means of accomplishing this can be found in theantidrug.com PSAs themselves. As Lee Edelman 70 U.S. House of Representatives. Committee on International Relations. U.S. Counternarcotics Policy in Afghanistan: Time for Leadership. 109 th Congress, 1 st Session, 2005. 3. 71 Marez, Drug Wars, 4. 72 Ibid. 178 notes in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, the rhetoric of the Child— “We’re fighting for the children. Whose side are you on?”—is “intended to avow that this issue… only permitted one side.” 73 By deploying images of the Child “whose innocence solicits our defense,” these public service announcements appeal to normative beliefs regarding the innocence and necessary protection of children who come to represent a future whose destruction is unthinkable and whose value is absolute. In “Sex in Public,” Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner argue that “In law and political ideology… the fetus and the child have been spectacularly elevated to the place of sanctified nationality.” 74 That is, “the figure of the Child” serves as the means by which the future of the nation as well as the “us” of the nation is conceived. This is, of course, at the expense of others, as “national heterosexuality is the mechanism by which a core national culture can be imagined as a sanitized space of sentimental feeling and immaculate behavior, a space of pure citizenship.” 75 The idea of “pure citizenship” is important to note here as theantidrug.com PSAs not only take advantage of the image of the Child to forward the organization’s political goals but also uses the Child to exclude drug users from this space of purity and national belonging as it conflates drug user with terrorist: “Technically, I didn’t kill these people. I just kinda helped.” “You killed me… they can’t do things like that without money.” If the child becomes the representative of a sanctified nationality then the drug user who funds terrorism is simultaneously excluded from this space and appealed to via this exclusion. These public service announcements “work by aligning subjects with collectives by 73 Edelman, No Future, 2. 74 Berlant, Lauren and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 2, Intimacy. (Winter 1998): 550. 75 Ibid 549. 179 Figure 16. "Marijuana Kills." Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. New Line, 2004. attributing ‘others’ as the ‘source’ of our feelings.” 76 The War on Terror has been particularly effective in aligning subjects with the collective of the national body and has done so in ways that allow for the incorporation of previously excluded subjects via patriotism. The effectiveness of a message linking recreational drug use to terrorism can be found in the reactionary and defensive denials of this message, as one YouTube user comments: “I buy directly from growers in my neighborhood. I’m not funding shit from any fucking foreign country.” Patriotism, it seems, knows no bounds, as such narconationalist reactions can be found in a variety of comments for similar PSAs. It is this alignment with the national body (“I buy directly from growers in my neighborhood”), which requires the othering of particular subjects (“I’m not funding shit from any fucking foreign country”), that allows us to consider how reproductive futurism is complicated by examinations of race and nation. 76 Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004. 1. 180 On the one hand, theantidrug.com’s public service announcements prey upon the fears of paranoid parents everywhere (theantidrug.com’s strategy has, more recently, moved away from claims that drug money funds terror to campaigns that declare that parents are the antidrug), and the explicit link made between drugs and terrorism has allowed for the inclusion of minority subjects across the lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality into a new and increasingly multicultural U.S. nationalism that demands the exclusion of drug users and terrorists. As Jasbir Puar notes, the September 11 th attacks and the subsequent War on Terror resulted in “the work of numerous national advocacy groups for Arab, Muslim, and Sikh Americans who presented their communities as established by upright, proper citizens, and the ubiquitous appearance of American flags in immigrant communities indicate the extent to which normative multiculturalism helped actively produce this renewed nationalism.” 77 In light of the War on Terror, it seems, the figure of the Child does indeed represent “the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention.” 78 But the fears generated by the public service announcement Drug Money Funds Terror also force us to consider the ways in which the Child is not only the beneficiary of this particular political intervention but also the reason this political intervention is necessary. In his murderous confession, “I killed mothers. I killed fathers. I killed grandmas. I killed grandpas. I killed sons. I killed daughters. I killed firemen. I killed policemen,” the child comes to stand in for the reproductive futurity of the terrorist Other which threatens to destroy the U.S. national body. As Berlant and Warner have noted, the figure of the racially othered Child stands in as a “crisis image” that “is also a racial 77 Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. 41. 78 Edelman 3. 181 mirage generated by a white-dominated society, supplying a specific phobia to organize its public so that a more substantial discussion of exploitation in the United States can be avoided and then remaindered to the part of collective memory sanctified not by nostalgia but by mass aversion.” 79 That is, Edelman’s formulation of the figure of the Child fails to take into account the ways in which the reproductive futurisms of racialized and national Others stand as a direct threat to the normative futurity of the US. The child stands in for the “threat to ‘normal’ or ‘core’ national culture” that reflects white fears of minoritization. 80 My intention in critiquing Edelman on this point is not to “assail the bourgeois privilege (variously described, in identitarian terms, as ‘white,’ ‘middle-class,’ ‘academic,’ or, more tellingly, ‘gay male’)” 81 of his argument, but rather to show the ways in which reproductive futurism, when considered on a global scale, creates its own frictions and conflicts. As the political ideologies of disparate groups stand in opposition to one another, so too does reproductive futurism come to simultaneously stand in for both future possibilities and Edelman’s proposed “No Future.” “He Say He Got a Bomb (Bong)!” Scholars such as Jasbir Puar and Sara Ahmed have observed that the War on Terror has resulted in the (temporary) incorporation of previously excluded subjects into the field of national belonging. The destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, served as a temporary turning point for those previously marginalized by (white) America as the vulnerability of the US became all too apparent. In Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion, vulnerability is defined in terms of “feelings of 79 Berlant and Warner 549. 80 Ibid. 81 Edelman 157n19. 182 susceptibility and openness to attack that influence the processes by which definitions of criminal danger are constructed and regarded as salient bases for action.” 82 Fear, she notes, “involves reading such openings as dangerous; the openness of the body to the world involves a sense of danger, which is anticipated as a future pain or injury.” 83 9/11 marked a point in which the openness of the national body became both apparent and a cause for action, and the vulnerability of the national body not only supplied ample justification for the US War on Terror and the reinvigoration of the War on Drugs, but resulted in renewed and heightened fears of an immigrant crisis on the domestic front. The reproduction of images of the 9/11 attacks transformed that event “into a fetish object… whereby individuals aligned themselves with the nation as being under attack.” 84 At a time when fear seems to be the most influential force in American politics, “suspicion itself becomes the grounds for detention,” and that suspicion has allowed for the materiality of racial signifiers to stand in as evidence, allowing for the creation of “a new identity category that groups together persons who appear ‘Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim’.” 85 In her work on the stand-up comedy of African Americans after September 11, Lanita Jacobs-Huey has noted the emergence of the “Arab as new nigger” phenomenon in the US. 86 She notes how “the harrowing events of 9/11 did not necessarily absolve Black men of the stigma of being dangerous so much as it temporarily recast them as potential allies in America’s new war on terrorism.” 87 The 82 Ahmed 68-69. 83 Ibid 69. 84 Ibid 74. 85 Ibid 75. 86 See Jacobs-Huey, Lanita. “‘The Arab is the New Nigger’: African American Comics Confront the Irony and Tragedy of September 11.” Transforming Anthropology, Vol. 14, Issue 1 (2006): 60-64 and “Black/‘Urban’ Standup Comedy: A Performance by Brandon Bowlin.” Performance Review, Vol. 55, Number 3 (October 2003): 539-541. 87 Jacobs-Huey, “The Arab is the New Nigger,” 61. 183 tenuous incorporation of African Americans into a patriotic national subjecthood that became the topic of Black comics’ stand-up acts works as both a critique of systems of incorporation that become useful for (Anglo) middle and upper-class Americans in times of crisis as well as an ironic commentary on newly emergent forms of racism in the US. Jacobs-Huey notes how “many African American comics sardonically celebrated the fortuitous emergence of a ‘new nigger’ and joked that while ‘patriotic’ Americans turned suspect gazes upon their fellow citizens of Middle Eastern and Indian descent, black males enjoyed a relative reprieve from racial profiling.” 88 The increased monitoring of Middle Eastern and Indian subjects and the “relative reprieve” from racial profiling enjoyed by Black men immediately following 9/11 serves as the entry point into the perilous journey embarked upon by Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay’s title characters. While going through a security checkpoint at an airport, Kumar is stopped by a light-skinned Black security guard who “needs him to step aside… [for] a random security check,” which leads to the following exchange: Kumar: Random, huh? So this has nothing to do with my ethnicity? Harold: Kumar, just do what the guy says. Security Guard: Sir, it’s our job as airport security to search for all possible weapons or illegal drugs. Kumar: So just because of the color of my skin, you assume that I have drugs on me? Harold laughs uncomfortably. Kumar: What are you a racist? Security Guard: Racist? Dude, I’m black! Harold: He’s black! He’s not racist! Kumar laughs. Kumar: Please, dude. You’re barely even brown. While this exchange is problematic in how it undercuts the ongoing racisms experienced by African Americans in the US, it also serves as a satirical commentary on the ways in 88 Jacobs-Huey, “Black/‘Urban’ Standup Comedy,” 540. 184 which particular racial groups have become incorporated into systems of power generated by the War on Terror that has resulted in the heightened monitoring of Middle Eastern and Indian subjects. As Jacobs-Huey notes, it is important to “carefully consider what America’s new war on terrorism will mean for… African Americans, who, in the words of comic/actor Faizon Love, ‘only get to be Americans when [the nation] needs something from them’.” 89 Of course, Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay is very much aware of the racism experienced by African Americans as a later scene shows Harold and Kumar’s own stereotypically informed suspicions of black men, when they crash their car in an African American neighborhood. As they run from the car rather than ask for help from these men, the scene cuts to the men as they roll in a spare tire and offer their assistance. In a scene immediately following Harold and Kumar’s “escape” from the black men, Homeland Security agent Ron Fox’s interrogation of a physically imposing man, whom Fox attempts to “break” by pouring the contents of a can of grape soda onto the pavement, elicits the response of “That’s racist!” from characters in the background. What these three scenes, taken together, show is the problematic nature of the “Arab as new nigger” premise itself. Jacobs-Huey makes note of this fact in her citation of comic “D.C.” Curry, who “personally takes issue with the ‘Arab as new nigger’ comparison. In [Curry’s] eyes, the metaphor fails to problematize the slur ‘nigger’ and falsely equates the recent hardships experienced by Arab Americans with the chronic struggles faced by African Americans.” 90 By exposing the racist attitudes that motivate Harold and Kumar’s flight from the black men whose only intentions are to assist them and Fox’s ridiculous interrogation of one of those black men, Escape from 89 Jacobs-Huey, “The Arab is the New Nigger,” 64. 90 Ibid 63-64. 185 Guantanamo Bay insightfully exposes the chronic racism that African Americans continue to experience in the contemporary US while also accounting for the recent hardships that have come to plague the lives of those “who appear ‘Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim’.” The conflation of Middle Eastern, Arab, Muslim, and South Asian identities that inform the racist practices and suspicions of “patriotic” Americans is most poignantly and hilariously exposed in Escape from Guantanamo Bay’s deployment of what Jasbir Puar, citing José Muñoz, refers to as “terrorist drag.” 91 Aboard the flight to Amsterdam, an elderly white woman imagines Kumar, in Osama bin Laden drag, childishly mimicking the fall and eventual destruction of the plane. As Puar states, “the garb of Muslim clerics is… naturalized as the fundamental dress of Osama bin Laden,” which functions, for the older white woman on the plane, as an always already Orientalist and essentialized understanding of race. This imagined “terrorist drag” also points to the ways in which South Asian and Muslim or Arab subjects have problematically come to stand in for the terrorist “other” as a function of U.S. nationalism, which must identify the other in order to anticipate and prevent future pain or injury. In Kumar’s mimicry of the plane’s destruction, the film cleverly reproduces a narrative of 9/11 that produces the white woman as “a subject that is endangered by imagined others whose proximity threatens not only to take something away from the subject… but to take the place of the subject.” 92 91 Puar xxii-xxiii. 92 Ahmed 43. 186 Figure 18. Terrorist Drag. Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. New Line, 2008. The role that Kumar plays for the white woman, as the imagined terrorist other, reveals the erasure of histories of domestic terrorism perpetrated by whites. In her citation of José Muñoz’s “writing on the ‘terrorist drag’ of the Los Angeles based performance artist Vaginal Davis,” Puar notes that Davis’s performance “as the white militiaman… astutely [brought] terrorism home—to Oklahoma City, in fact—and in doing so dislodge[d], at least momentarily, the Orientalist legacy of terrorism.” 93 Post-9/11, acts of white terrorism such as the Oklahoma City bombing have all but been erased from the (white) American imaginary, allowing for the exclusive targeting of racialized subjects in the US War on Terror that is rarely, if ever, framed as racist itself. Jacobs-Huey cites “‘Earthquake,’ a particularly gifted comic, [who mused] ‘Many people wonder why I’m not tripping after the terrorist attacks in New York and D.C. I’m a niggah—I’ve been dealing with [White] terrorists all my life!” 94 So while white Americans have seemingly forgotten about acts of white terrorism such as the Oklahoma City bombing and the 93 Puar xxiii. 94 Jacobs-Huey, “The Arab is the New Nigger,” 60-61. 187 actions of individuals such as Theodore Kaczynski (a.k.a. the Unibomber), Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay and the work of a variety of African American stand-up comics “bring terrorism home” in ways that not only remind us of specific events and people, but the ways in which white racist dominance has terrorized people of color throughout the country’s turbulent history and into the present. White racist dominance has not only functioned as a form of terrorism domestically, but has had larger, global implications as well. With regard to the War on Drugs, Curtis Marez notes how “The war on drugs has… precipitated a qualitative shift toward the militarization of police power, making it difficult to say where domestic policy ends and foreign policy beings.” 95 This observation is especially useful to consider as the War on Terror has also led to a difficulty in distinguishing between foreign and domestic policy. His analysis of the US’s assistance in supporting right-wing paramilitary groups in countries like Colombia can help us to understand how the US itself has terrorized racialized, poor, and subaltern subjects for decades to serve its own global interests. It is the mass mediation of the War on Terror/Drugs that has allowed for the obfuscation of US responsibility, as mass media itself has helped to construct the war through particular representations of it. Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay thus stands out, in many ways, from other mass media representations of the War on Terror such as The Kingdom (2007), Rendition (2007), and the prescient The Siege (1998), among many others, all of which perform critiques of government policies regarding terrorism while simultaneously reifying public perceptions regarding the foreign-ness of terrorist subjects who are always portrayed by Middle Eastern or South Asian actors. 95 Marez 4. 188 It is no surprise then that Kumar becomes the target of suspicion simply for being brown. When he inconspicuously engages in “suspicious activity,” taking a hit off of his hilariously bomb-like bong, the white woman who had previously imagined him in terrorist drag screams “TERRORIST!” causing widespread panic aboard the plane. As he walks out of the airplane lavatory, he tries to explain that “this is just a bong,” eliciting the even more fearful and panicked response of “He say he got a bomb!” In this moment, Kumar’s mistaken identity as a terrorist becomes inextricably tied to the conflation of bomb with bong that reflects the larger conflation of the War on Terror with the War on Drugs. That Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay is a stoner comedy allows us to suspend our disbelief at the unlikelihood of such a scenario in which someone would smoke marijuana on a plane. As the “logics” of reality are suspended by the (il)logics of being stoned, the film cleverly exposes the very illogics that came to reflect our lived reality in the midst of the War on Terror. While many would argue that drug use functions as a form of escapism, getting stoned in a Harold & Kumar film typically shifts daily happenings away from escapism and into an exaggerated form of persecution, marginalization, and shenanigans. That “people of color convicted of nonviolent drug crimes account for the majority of the increase” in the US prison population from the 1980s to the present only reaffirms the ridiculousness of such accusations and provides a stark contrast to the unfettered enjoyment of drug use typically portrayed in Anglocentric slacker and stoner films. 96 The suspension of logic is also useful in considering the ways in which marijuana suspends the logics of normative time. Returning to Edelman’s concept of reproductive futurism, we can consider the ways in which this form of normative temporality is far 96 Ibid 8. 189 more paranoid than the stoner himself. In Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings, paranoia is defined “not as mental illness but as a species of fear based on the dysphoric apprehension of a holistic and all-encompassing system.” 97 If fear itself is, as Ahmed contends, based upon the anticipation of a future pain or injury that can, essentially, be perpetrated by anyone at any time (based on the idea that “anyone could be a terrorist”), then we can begin to think of the ways in which reproductive futurism is always already determined by a paranoid understanding of temporality. That is, if reproductive futurism depends upon the protection and preservation of the future, then it is already driven by a paranoid logic which assumes that we must “safeguard our children.” In light of this, I would like to propose the idea that marijuana produces a “terrorist temporal drag” in Guantanamo Bay, a temporality that is, to some extent, informed by the conception of drag proposed by Elizabeth Freeman, defined as “the pull of the past upon the present.” 98 In the opening moments of Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies (2008), CIA Agent Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe), giving a report to a committee on the status of the U.S. government’s “War on Terror,” states: Now you see our enemy has realized they’re fighting guys from the future. It is brilliant as it is infuriating. If you live like it’s the past and you behave like it’s the past, then guys from the future find it very hard to see you. You throw away your cell phone, shut down your e-mail, pass on your instructions face-to-face, hand-to-hand. Turn your back on technology and just disappear into the crowd. This articulation of the temporality of terrorism is useful to note insofar as it reveals the ways in which terrorism’s representation as the “past” that haunts and seeks to destroy the “future”—temporal signifiers that are always already connected to specific places— 97 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005): 299. 98 Freeman, Elizabeth. “Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations.” New Literary History 31, No. 4 (Autumn 2000): 728. 190 articulates the particular anxieties symptomatic of proximity to the other in a global era. Such spatio-temporal configurations posit the “dangers” of proximity in both space and time to different regions, nations, and their peoples via paranoid articulations of vulnerability characteristic of what Furedi calls “a culture of fear” and Dunant and Porter refer to as an “age of anxiety.” 99 Thus, the slowing of time in the present that is often the direct result of drags from a bong which, like a bomb, explodes normative conceptions and perceptions of time, also serve as a means of understanding how Harold & Kumar explodes the normative conventions of the predominantly white slacker-stoner comedy genre. Marijuana use in the Harold & Kumar movies result in, as Jean Selz, referring to Walter Benjamin’s hashish experiments notes, “the complete annihilation of one’s normal sense of time.” 100 As Puar states in Terrorist Assemblages, “in the midst of frenetic speeds of crisis and urgency, a slowing of time happens, and with it, a deeper scrutiny of every single experienced moment.” 101 For Harold and Kumar, urgency can range from the urgent need to consume tiny little White Castle hamburgers to the need to escape Guantanamo Bay. The drag on time that results from the drags taken from a bong, creates an “enlarged and spacious timescape,” in which the judgment of time “depends on how many ‘events’ we can perceive in a given unit of time.” 102 The enlargement of a timescape via drags from a bong represents an act of violent upheaval in the face of the normative temporality of fear, which constantly anticipates future pain or injury at the expense of ignoring or even erasing the pain and injury 99 See Furedi, Frank. Culture of Fear: Risk-taking and the Morality of Low Expectation. London: Cassell, 1997; The Age of Anxiety. Eds. Sarah Dunant and Roy Porter. London: Virago, 1996. Quoted in Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004. 100 Selz, Jean. “An Experiment by Walter Benjamin.” in Benjamin, Walter. On Hashish. Trans. Howard Eiland and Others. Cambridge, MA & London: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2006. 147. 101 Puar xxi. 102 Ibid. 191 suffered by people in the present. In a May 2007 speech following the veto of an Iraq withdrawal plan, President George W. Bush stated: It makes no sense to tell the enemy when you plan to start withdrawing. All the terrorists would have to do is mark their calendars and gather their strength—and begin plotting how to overthrow the government and take control of the country of Iraq. I believe setting a deadline for withdrawal would demoralize the Iraqi people, would encourage killers across the broader Middle East, and send a signal that America will not keep its commitments. Setting a deadline for withdrawal is setting a date for failure—and that would be irresponsible. 103 Bush’s concerns regarding the future of Iraq, in which the announced withdrawal date of US troops would mark a moment that terrorists would only need to “wait out,” not only reflects a rhetoric of fear (“if we quit now, they’ll eventually come after us”) but a temporality of anticipation based upon fear (fear of death, fear of failure), an anticipation which always looks to the future at the expense of the present. “Terrorist temporal drag,” is non-normative both because it offers a means of rupturing hegemonic demands upon the future at the expense of those always already marginalized by such demands and in its deep investment in the present, a present that becomes dragged out, slowed, allowing for a deeper scrutiny of every single experienced moment, “a slowing down of individual frames necessary to really comprehend and attend to… crisis.” 104 Disidentifying with the Racist Archive In the introduction to her review of Brandon Bowlin’s stand-up performance at North Hollywood’s Ha Ha Café, Lanita Jacobs-Huey writes: “As terrorism, fear, and violence unfold on the world stage, one might question the role of comedy in this tragic milieu. Can we laugh during times like this? What insights might we gain from humor in 103 Bush, George W. "Remarks on Returning Without Approval to the House of Representatives the 'U.S. Troop Readiness, Veterans' Care, Katrina Recovery, and Iraq Accountability Appropriations Act, 2007.'" The American Presidency Project. May 1, 2007. <http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=73974.> 104 Puar xxi. 192 the wake of September 11 and the war in Iraq?” 105 As this review and her more detailed article on post-9/11 Black stand-up performance suggest, not only can we laugh at times like this, but laughter is in many ways an effective form of resistance against oppressive structures of power; laughter is indeed, to quote a cheesy expression, “the best medicine.” To conclude this chapter, I would like to think about the ways in which racial satire, oftentimes if not always marked by “racist” humor, functions through a disidentification with the racist archive. My understanding of “disidentification” is derived from José Muñoz’s groundbreaking work Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, in which he writes: “Disidentification is meant to be descriptive of the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship.” 106 As Muñoz has elaborated elsewhere, “normative citizenship” is dependent upon an “‘official’ national affect, a mode of being in the world primarily associated with white middle-class subjectivity.” 107 Rather than an identification or even counter-identification, “To disidentify is to read oneself and one’s own life narrative in a moment, object, or subject that is not culturally coded to ‘connect’ with the disidentifying subject.” 108 At a seminar at the 24 th Annual Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival entitled “Toke 2: The Harold & Kumar Story,” writer/directors Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg observed that during test screenings of Harold & Kumar Escape from 105 Jacobs-Huey, “Black/‘Urban’ Standup Comedy,” 539. 106 Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 4. 107 Muñoz, José Esteban. “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho’s The Sweetest Hangover (and Other STDs).” Theatre Journal 52 (2000): 69. 108 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 12. 193 Guantanamo Bay people of color of various racial backgrounds laughed the hardest at those moments when their particular groups became the subject of racist jokes in the film. 109 Asian Americans laughed harder when Korean American Harold Lee was referred to as “Hello Kitty” or mistaken as a North Korean; African American audience members laughed harder at Ron Fox’s grape soda interrogation of the “dangerous” Black man; Middle Eastern and South Asian subjects laughed harder when Kumar was asked to step aside at a “random” airport security check; Jews laughed when Ron Fox, during an interrogation of the films very own “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern” (named Goldstein and Rosenberg), spills a sack of pennies on the table in front them in an act of temptation. What can we make of such reactions by people of color to these negative stereotypes, especially if we assume that the laughter was not a result of discomfort but reflective of actual enjoyment and honest humor? It is my contention that racial satire such as Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay appropriates the racist archive as a disidentificatory strategy, as racism itself is not “culturally coded to ‘connect’” with racially marked subjects but always already reflective of the very stereotypes and attitudes that have marginalized and subjugated them. Disidentificatory strategies, as strategies of survival, are also strategies of resistance. By “making fun of racism,” Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (as well as Go to White Castle), allows its audiences to laugh at the ridiculousness of the very stereotypes that have been constructed to work against them, alleviating some (although never all) of the violence that racism performs upon the racialized subject. As 109 Hurwitz, Jon and Hayden Schlossberg. “Toke 2: The Harold & Kumar Story.” 24 th Annual Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. 3 May 2008. 194 Figure 19. "Extremely accurate." Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. New Line, 2004. Curtis Marez argues, “the process of representation… remains an actively interpretive one that leaves room for critical revision and dissent.” 110 In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida notes that “The citizens who thus held and signified political power [archons] were considered to possess the right to make or to represent the law. The archons are first of all the documents’ guardians. They are also accorded the hermeneutic right and competence. They have the power to interpret the archives. Entrusted to such archons, these documents in effect speak the law: they recall the law and call on or impose the law.” 111 People of color are all too familiar with the ways in which whiteness, as a “cultural logic… can be understood as an affective code that positions itself as the law.” 112 Yet in the disidentificatory appropriation of the racist archive, people of color are able, not to call on or impose the law, but to resist its 110 Marez 8. 111 Derrida, Jaques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. 2. 112 Muñoz, “Feeling Brown,” 69. 195 hegemonic authority. Laughter thus becomes a critique of the racist logics that determine the law, it becomes a means of temporarily usurping the power to interpret an archive that has so often robbed us of our power and agency, and the light-heartedness we feel in those moments of uproarious laughter is a feeling that comes from experiencing the radical possibilities of both relief and release from the guarded and tense feelings that racism produces in its objects. 196 Epilogue “The Dream of the 90s”: Uncertainty, Nostalgia, and the Rise of Artisanal Masculinity in the 21st Century U.S. In the opening sketch of the Independent Film Channel’s comedy series Portlandia, Fred Armisen’s Jason asks Carrie Brownstein’s Melanie if she “remembers the 90s?” and recalls a decade when people were “talking about getting piercings and... tribal tattoos,” “singing about saving the planet and forming bands,” “encouraged to be weird... and watch someone hang something from their penis,” and “could grow up to wanna be a clown.” During this recollection of the possibilities and eccentricities of the 1990s, Jason notes that it was a time “when people were content to be unambitious... They’d sleep ‘til eleven, just hang out with friends... and they had no occupations whatsoever,” to which Melanie responds, “I thought that died out a long time ago.” “Not in Portland,” Jason assures her, “[Portland’s] a place where that idea still exists as a reality.” The sketch’s characterization of Portland as a city where the “Dream of the 90s” is alive and thriving not only gestures toward the indebtedness of the bourgeois bohemians and hipsters who dot Portlandia’s televisual landscape to Generation X, but also draws our attention to the ongoing relevance of the slacker as an important genealogical node and means for understanding these contemporary figures in the present, even if we think “that died out a long time ago.” As discussed throughout this dissertation and emphasized in my second chapter, slackers often embrace and explore ways of living and working that deviate from those encouraged by traditional forms of heteronormative, capitalist ambition as a response to the miseries associated with the corporate workplace and the unsatisfying forms of 197 Figure 20. “Dream of the 90s.” Portlandia. IFC, 2010. “creativity” promoted by consumer capitalism, which, to recall Coupland, “made us confuse shopping with creativity.” During the 1990s in particular, slackers understood work as a necessary means of subsidizing more important and oftentimes creative pursuits, and regularly sought satisfaction elsewhere, by playing in bands, making art, writing novels, or, Portlandia reminds us, going to clown school. As Ann Powers explains in Weird Like Us, “To slackers, employment is optimal when it comes as punctuation—just enough to pay for rent and groceries... and then it’s back to whatever real business occupies you.” 113 Powers’ description of employment as punctuation draws our attention to the ways in which the “slacker boom” of the early 1990s was informed by a desire to pursue more fulfilling lives that were not contingent upon work-based identities and stifled by workplace miseries, but also an outgrowth of the Reagan era and its neoliberal policies. 113 Powers, Ann. Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America. New York & London: Simon & Schuster, 2000. 154. 198 While Republicans continue to credit Reagan with increasing employment rates following the stagflation of the 1970s, Reaganomics did little to resolve problems of long-term, stable employment. In fact, Reagan era policies resulted in the rise of a labor market that was increasingly favoring service sector employment (Coupland’s “McJobs”) in the wake of deindustrialization, informing the growing prominence of contingent or “throwaway” labor and the decline of long-term secure jobs in the U.S., trends that have continued into the present. If, to recall the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s 1974 report Work in America, a significant number of Americans were already dissatisfied with the quality of their working lives due to the dull, repetitive, and seemingly meaningless tasks required of them, then Reagan’s economic policies and the neoliberal transformation of the job market did little to resolve and even exacerbated the increasingly prevalent dissatisfaction with work. Insofar as management gurus and employers alike scrambled to understand the so-called “slacker” generation in their efforts to harness the untapped creative and productive potential of this seemingly disaffected and disinterested group, the slacker’s relevance to understanding the rise of “creative” and “no-collar” work and the bourgeois bohemians and hipsters they produced cannot be underestimated. Andrew Ross writes that “By the 1990s, it was widely believed that the pursuit of the good life was no longer compatible with full-time employment in corporate America,” recalling the disenchantment expressed by Coupland’s slackers in Generation X and which motivates them to seek “the good life” by other means. 114 Management gurus, lamenting the absence of creativity in the American corporate sector, began looking to the “humane 114 Ross, Andrew. No Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003. 8. 199 workplaces” of high-tech companies as models to be followed in the pursuit of a new “corporate Renaissance.” In the no-collar workplace, remnants of Fordist production methods in the corporate sector such as “data entry” were set aside in favor of self-application and the promotion of creativity. Kathi Weeks notes that the “postindustrial work-ethic,” which “characterized work as a path to individual self-expression, self-development, and creativity,” was “at least in part a response to the rebellions in the 1960s and early 1970s against the disciplinary subjectivity of the Fordist period and the problem of worker alienation that they helped to publicize.” 115 Another part of the rise of the “postindustrial work-ethic” can be understood as a response to the increasingly publicized expressions of disinterest in pursuing jobs that lacked creativity and gratification on the part of the “baby bust” generation who were already raising concerns regarding a potential labor shortage. While print media certainly covered this issue, the slacker films of the 1990s seemed to confirm these sentiments and through their popularity contributed to the perception of their prevalence. Along with the “digital artisans” of Ross’ high-tech, no-collar workplaces, an increasing number of American’s desired greater job satisfaction and forms of work that required and encouraged creativity, attracted to the element of “human self-recognition” afforded them by these humane workplaces, reflecting at least some desire to live by Marx’s declaration that man is free only when he “recognizes himself in a world he has himself created.” 116 This desire to limit, if not eliminate, the alienation of human labor from the commodity through the intimacy and personal investment afforded by 115 Weeks, The Problem with Work, 46, 60. 116 Ross 2. 200 “artisanal” labor, and provides both an analogue and one historical precursor for what economists have recently dubbed “the New Artisan Economy.” In Portlandia’s sequel to “Dream of the 90s,” Brownstein and Armisen (reprising their roles as Jason and Melanie) reflect not upon the 1990s but rather the 1890s, asking, “Remember in the 1890s when the economy was in a tailspin, unwashed young men roamed the streets looking for work, and people turned their backs on huge corporate monopolies and supported local businesses? Well in Portland, people raise their own chickens and cure their own meats.” Moreso than its predecessor, “The Dream of the 1890s,” asks us to recognize the parallels between the 1890s and the present in its citation of economic recession and the loss of trust in “big business” and corporate banks deemed “too big to fail,” recalling the economic recession of the 1890s and the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act. Its mention of “people raising their own chickens and curing their own meats” additionally makes note of the increasing popularity of urban or “backyard” chicken farming, and seemingly anticipates the very brief surge in reporting in July of 2013 on the failures of urban farmers—often directly identified as hipsters by the press— to sustain this practice as animal shelters were flooded with, as one story puts it, “hundreds of unwanted urban fowl” as “hipster urban farmers [learned] that chickens are hard to raise.” 117 As Michael Blaustein explains, “Raising chickens in backyard coops is all the rage with nostalgia-loving hipsters but apparently the facial hair obsessed faux farmers often don’t realize that raising hens is loud, labor intensive work.” In this 117 Blaustein, Michael. "Hipster urban farmers learn that chickens are hard to raise, animal shelters inundated with unwanted hens." New York Post, July 10 2013 <http://nypost.com/2013/07/10/hipster- urban-farmers-learn-that-chickens-are-hard-to-raise-animal-shelters-inundated-with-unwanted-hens/>. See also, Aleccia, Jonel. "Backyard chickens dumped at shelters when hipsters can't cope, critics say." NBC News, 7 July 2013 <http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/backyard-chickens-dumped-shelters- when-hipsters-cant-cope-critics-say-f6C10533508>. 201 description, the author makes clear the relationship between the hipster and slacker, and suggests that the ambitions of the hipster fall short as his slacker ways inevitably results in his inability to cope with the labor required to properly and effectively sustain this particular practice. Figure 21. “(M)EAT.” Portlandia. IFC, 2012. “The Dream of the 1890s” makes abundantly clear that the resurgence in popularity of particular styles—exemplified by the bearded hipster—and the turn towards the forms of labor, entrepreneurship, and consumerism that characterize this “New Artisan Economy” owe a debt to, or at the very least oddly (and in some cases overtly) resemble, the 19th century. In contrast to “the industrialization of bohemia” in the 1990s, the sketch enables us to understand how the “New Artisan Economy” is both a direct response to the failures of corporate and financial capitalism in the 21st century and an expression of the need among working class and bourgeois bohemians alike to reclaim some sense of autonomy in the wake of the increasing dependence on debt and contingent and part-time employment, fostered by Reagan’s failed trickle-down economic policies 202 and made astonishingly clear during the 2008 recession. Both sketches make clear how these efforts to reclaim earlier forms of life are nostalgic to the core, reminding us not only that nostalgia is, as Simon Reynolds explains, “a response to the build-up of ideas and styles whose potentials have not been fully extracted” but also often reflects a dissatisfaction with the present, and a limited and sometimes anachronistic means of reforming the present and imagining the future. While “The Dream of the [19]90s” recalls a time when slacking was a means of “liberating” ourselves from our overinvestment in work and the work ethic, the Dream of the 1890s that inform current economic, social, political, and cultural trends (including trends pertaining to facial hair) reify the work ethic as the primary means of asserting one’s autonomy in the marketplace. As Charles Heying and Marianne Ryder write in Brew to Bikes: Portland’s Artisan Economy, the grassroots component of this new artisan economy “is grounded in self-reliance and sustainable development, and is reclaiming the integrity of work” through economic localism and “a new orientation toward the making and use of goods; an economy that integrates the work of hands, head, and heart” to restore “human self-recognition” to commodity production that was lost during the era of industrial capitalism and Fordism. 118 And yet, while the new artisan economy may deviate from the unsustainable and alienating practices often associated with neoliberal capitalism, its reclamation of the “integrity of work” and embracing of both a pre- industrial artisanal and postindustrial work-ethic make abundantly clear its goals for reforming rather than challenging capitalism. 118 Heying, Charles and Marianne Ryder. "Genesis of the Concept." Brew to Bikes: Portland's Artisan Economy. Portland: Ooligan Press, 2010. 32. 203 Taken together, Portlandia’s “Dream of the 90s” and “1890s” serve as canny reflections on the temporal resonances between the 1990s and the 1890s—those historical moments in which the term “slacker” and the slacker as subcultural identity came into being—and provides us with an index for why the figure of the slacker is key to understanding the artisanal and creative labor and lifestyle politics of the present. Heying and Ryder note that the new artisan economy involved a grassroots response to “the tyranny of work and consumption” and the “rediscovery of craft and the integrity of work.” 119 Acknowledging the contemporary moment’s indebtedness to the late 19th century in their citation of William Morris and John Ruskin of the Arts and Crafts Movement as well as the “voluntary simplicity” advocated by Henry David Thoreau, Morris and Ryder’s own preoccupation with “the Dream of the 1890s” forgets what Portlandia’s “Dream of the 1990s” reminds us of in its identification of contemporary hipsterism’s origins in 90s slackerdom: the do-it-yourself ethos of punk that heavily influenced 1990s subcultural production and became increasingly normalized and appropriated as Generation X finally “grew up,” evidenced, for example, in the television channel DIY Network and the website Lifehacker. Heying and Ryder’s citation of Thoreau is of particular note (in part because of his resurgent popularity among rightwing libertarians) because of their appropriation of the 19th century figure as a means of advancing a particular form of capitalism and theory and praxis of urban revitalization. As Tavia Nyong’o reminds us, “Anyone who sought to live in such precise antagonism to his own particularly [sic] day as Thoreau did can hardly have thought highly of those present day communities who idealize an arbitrary point in the past, beyond which they refuse to develop... what he meant by 119 Ibid 35-39. 204 individualism was different, almost antithetical, to the possessive, endlessly flexible individual so valorized today.” 120 Rather than a turn away from heteronormative, capitalist ambitions, the new artisan economy is largely a reformulation of such ambitions and an anachronistic and de-contextualized appropriation of 19th century oppositional ideas that should not be so haphazardly applied to the present. Heying and Ryder’s discussion of artisanal labor and its grounding in “self- reliance” recalls another 19th century figure, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who once said of Thoreau, “He seemed born for greatness... and I cannot help counting it as a fault in him that he had no ambition.” 121 Emerson’s words (delivered at Thoreau’s funeral) recall, but do not directly inform, the difference between the slacker, whose lack of ambition renders him a “loser,” and his artisanal predecessor whose entrepreneurial ambitions have given rise to the new artisan economy and transformed cities like Portland and the gentrified hipster and creative class enclaves in cities across the U.S. The valorization of the new artisan economy forecloses the possibilities for a more critical analysis of how the fetishization of localism and artisanal goods places limits, and at times bars access to, those goods and locations along lines of race and class. In this sense, Heying and Ryder reinforce neoliberal understandings of consumer choice as the primary form of political, ethical, and moral expression. Their romanticization of the resurgence of artisanal labor leaves us without a more sustained discussion of the racial character of this new artisan economy and how it reflects both the demographics of Portland, which is primarily white, and gentrified neighborhoods in urban centers throughout the U.S. where “artisan” businesses have become increasingly popular and an integral part of the “economic 120 Nyong'o, Tavia. "Henry and Grover, Drowning in a Bathtub." Bully Bloggers. 12 October 2013. <http://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2013/10/12/henry-and-grover-drowning-in-a-bathtub/>. 121 Sandage 1. 205 revitalization” efforts that marginalize working class people of color. In fact, Heying’s very brief discussion of gentrification in the introduction to Brew to Bikes is quickly dismissed in the text as he admits, “Perhaps it’s just too nice a morning” to consider the “heavy weight concerns of class analysis, urban cultural theory, and more.” 122 Just as Portlandia draws our attention to the reverberation of the 1990s and 1890s in the present, it also draws our attention to the ways in which the new artisan economy has given rise to nostalgic models of white, male masculinity informed by the particular forms of work and entrepreneurship that define it. Amidst visual as well as spoken and sung references to artisan butcher shops, microbreweries, and the like, “The Dream of the 1890s” notes the resurgence of the “heroic artisan” as a masculine type in the present, most notably through its portrayal of men in 19th century style beards, mustaches, and mutton chops, and its almost entirely male line-up of characters, who at one point sing “welcome to the sausage party” as they hold up ropes of artisanal sausage. In Manhood in America, Michael Kimmel describes the “heroic artisan” as “Independent, virtuous, and honest... an honest toiler, unafraid of hard work, proud of his craftsmanship and self- reliance.” 123 While the decline of the heroic artisan in the 19th century was informed by the rise of industrial factories and mass-production, Portlandia makes clear the ways in which the resurgence of the artisan economy and artisanal masculinity in the 21st century are a direct response to the uncertainty and powerlessness resulting from the corporate failure and high unemployment that have characterized the “Great Recession.” 122 Heying, Charles. "Introduction." Brew to Bikes: Portland's Artisan Economy. Portland: Ooligan Press, 2010. 15. 123 Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York & London: The Free Press, 1996. 16. 206 Figure 22. “Welcome to the Sausage Party.” Portlandia. IFC, 2012 Eric Lott argues that “changes in the ideologies of manhood” are often “undergirded by a massive shift in political economy.” 124 Considering that the current, slow economic recovery has largely favored white men, leading some to call it “The Economic HE-covery,” as well as news coverage linking narratives of economic crisis alongside discussions of the “crisis of masculinity” in the present, an examination of the work-gender dialectic is absolutely essential, particularly in studies of newly emergent or resurgent forms of labor. Lott notes that men’s feelings of occupying an “embattled” masculinity can often result in violence against women and non-white people and can result not only in physical violence but in social, political, and economic violence and neglect, made evident, for example, in the ongoing conservative battle against women’s reproductive rights as well as the resurgent popularity of race and class based discourses that deploy the work ethic as a means of pathologizing people of color and the poor as 124 Lott, Eric. "All the King's Men: Elvis Impersonators and White Working-Class Masculinity." Race and the Subject of Masculinities. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1997. 196. 207 well as the unemployed and homeless, whose conditions are understood via neoliberal logics as voluntary, as signs of a refusal to take personal responsibility, as a choice. Although contemporary masculinities do not define themselves always and absolutely against racialized and gendered others, it is important to consider the extent to which economic dependence has historically been equated with social and sexual dependence, as defined through the figure of the black slave and the woman, or more recently, the welfare queen. 19th century artisans, too, relied upon their clear distinction from these groups as a means of asserting their muscular autonomy in their efforts to sustain their increasingly tenuous role during a time of economic transformation. During the rise of the new artisan economy the figure of the bearded hipster, who adopts the masculine styles of the 19th century, has emerged and may provide additional insights into a current turn toward traditional forms of masculinity that do not merely appropriate 19th century styles but also attitudes and gender ideologies. During a Huffpost Live conversation on the contemporary meaning of masculinity, co-founder of Vice and so-called “Godfather of Hipsterdom,” Gavin McInnes lamented the bygone days when men could be men, citing feminism as the cause for the rise of “beta males” and a broader “anti-masculinity” push in contemporary America. 125 Linking what he sees as a culture of emasculation to an anti-entrepreneurial ethos on the part of the American Left, McInnes not only claims that such views are “ultimately anti-American,” but implies that such efforts are actually resulting in the 125 Numerous articles refer to McInnes as the "Godfather of Hipsterdom." See, for example: Barker, Paul. "Gavin McInnes: An In-depth Interveiw with 'The Godfather of Hipsterdom." 2 April 2012. <http://thoughtcatalog.com/paul-barker/2012/04/gavin-mcinnes-how-to-piss-in-public-extensive- interview/>; Fustich, Katie. "'Hipster Godfather' Gavin McInnes Says 'Feminism Makes Women Miserable'." Bust. 28 October 2013. <http://www.bust.com/hipster-godfather-gavin-mcinnes-says- feminism-makes-women-miserable.html>; May, Caroline. "'Godfather of Hipsterdom' Gavin McInnes: Feminism makes women miserable." The Daily Caller. 23 October 2013. <http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/23/godfather-of-hipsterdom-feminism-makes-women-miserable/>. 208 deterioration of the nation itself: “America is unique: it was built by entrepreneurs with grit, and when—what seems just like a bunch of pussies being beta-males and women are railing against people like me simply for defending traditional families... I think it’s a real latent anti-Americanism,” adding that “entrepreneurs should be seen as heroes.” 126 In McInnes’ valorization of “heroic” entrepreneurs (who are apparently always men), we can see his own indebtedness to 19th century artisans’ conceptions of autonomy and manhood: “Loss of autonomy was equated with emasculation; economic dependence on wages paid by an employer was equivalent to social and sexual dependency,” attributes that were often associated with women and people of color. 127 The reclamation of masculinity on the part of McInnes and his ilk relies upon notions of self-reliance and the valorization of financial independence (failing to consider the financial dependence of many small business owners on the institutions they are often financially indebted to) and is dependent upon the assumption of an attack on entrepreneurship and, by virtue of this, rugged masculinity itself, despite the growth of artisan economies not only in Portland but in creative class enclaves in urban centers throughout the U.S. McInnes’ misogynist rant—informed by a nostalgia for the bygone days of manliness and the heroic industriousness and entrepreneurial spirit with which it was associated—as well as his identification as the “Godfather of Hipsterdom,” not only serves as a reminder of how the “crisis of masculinity” has regularly resulted in misogynistic backlash against women, but what Candice Chung identifies as the rise of 126 "Gavin McInnes Launches Expletive-Laden Tirade About Women In The Workplace." The Huffington Post. 21 October 2013 <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/21/gavin-mcinnes-women- workplace_n_4138741.html>. 127 Kimmel 31. 209 “hipster sexism.” 128 Perpetrated by oftentimes college-educated, middle-class men who might identify as liberal, socially conscious, and even feminist, “hipster sexism,” Chung explains, involves the use of irony in casual expressions of misogyny, and “rests on the fundamental belief that anything wrapped up in enough irony will somehow transcend from ‘utterly repulsive’ to ‘funny’—rendering ‘jokes’... regrettably ‘acceptable’ in certain social circles.” In an article titled “The Age of Hipster Sexism,” Alissa Quart notes that “Hipster Sexism consists of the objectification of women but in a manner that uses mockery, quotation marks, and paradox,” and suggests that hipster sexism itself has expanded beyond men to include the women, not as a “reverse sexist” practice, but as an internalization of ironic sexism. 129 Expressing concern regarding an Obama campaign ad by Lena Dunham, in which the actress “coquettishly compared voting for the first time to a woman losing her virginity,” Quart quickly lumps this ad together with the prevalent “ironic sexism” found in ads, photographs, television shows (including Dunham’s Girls), films, and T-shirts. Her reading of the ad as “weirdly paternalistic,” itself borrowing from the conservative backlash against the Obama campaign’s use of the ad, is important to consider, as nearly every statement reroutes issues pertaining to women’s rights and their decision to vote through a discussion of men (You want to do it with a guy “who really cares about and understands women. A guy who cares if you get health insurance and specifically whether you get birth control,” rather than a guy “not signing the Lily Ledbetter Act,” the ad tells us). Of course, her assessment of the ad’s humor as deriving 128 Chung, Candice. "Hipster sexism." Daily Life. 10 May 2012. <http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and- views/dl-opinion/hipster-sexism-20120509-1ycnc.html>. 129 Quart, Alissa. "The Age of Hipster Sexism." New York Magazine. 30 October 2012. <http://nymag.com/thecut/2012/10/age-of-hipster-sexism.html>. 210 from the opportunity it presents for audiences “to laugh at the idea of young women so obsessed with boys and sex that they mistake voting for sex” is reductive and assumes that the laughter it elicits stems from this “mistake.” An alternative reading might consider the ways in which Dunham articulates women’s desires for men whose masculinity does not reflect the misogyny that arises from a sense of embattlement or an investment in patriarchal power, who, to quote Audre Lorde, “will not be destroyed by, nor settle for, those corruptions called power... who will recognize that the legitimate objects of his hostility are not women, but the particulars of a structure that programs him to fear and despise women as well as his own... self,” while still remaining critical of the paternalism contained within the ad’s insistence on what women “should” want. 130 Quart’s discussion of instances of “hipster sexism” in Dunham’s HBO comedy Girls is notable, for the purposes of this project, because it suggests that the mere insertion of women into what has up until recently been a predominantly male role does not necessarily result in entirely new understandings of the role women might play in helping us elucidate and find alternatives to the masculine, male anti-work politics of the slacker. She writes: As funny as Dunham’s Girls is, it can definitely border on Hipster Sexism. For example, take the episode when the male protagonist Adam says, “Yo skank, where you at? Getting that pussy pounded?” Hipster Sexism supposedly makes “pussy pounding” funny because it announces that the phrase is now ironic — as is, “skank” — rather than gross or offensive. Indeed, Dunham’s Hannah Horvath frequently rolls with such statements throughout the series. While the male slacker often benefits from the exploitation of his more successful girlfriend’s or wife’s labor and income, reifying his male privilege and enjoying the fruits of his romantic partner’s labor, the slacker girl, it seems, ultimately falls into traditional 130 Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007. 74. 211 gender roles insofar as she is rescued “by young men whose privilege eclipses their own.” As Sarah Kessler reminds us in “Working Girls,” “When aspirational white girls of the Mary Tyler Moore variety fail to ‘make it,’ Girls tells us, there’s another option: partnership with an aspirational white man more likely to succeed.” 131 Yet the fact that the “crisis of labor” that so often informs discussions of the “crisis of masculinity” and representations of male slackers are, representationally and materially, crossing over into depictions of female slackers is important to note. Kessler writes, “Some commentators on the show have decried its protagonists’ privileged idleness; others have celebrated their sexual and creative liberation.” While criticisms of slackers’ privileged idleness are certainly notable, Kessler argues that what Girls does accomplish is to provide a perspective rarely, if ever, offered by the typical, male-driven slacker narrative: What both of these perspectives fail to grasp is the centrality of work to Girls’ narrative, even as no work seems to be getting done. Girls documents, and sometimes critiques, a world in which young bourgeois white women undertake the “work” of becoming themselves—a task viewed as paramount, superior to all other forms of labor. At the same time, the show reminds us that no matter how hard they “work” at growing, its main characters will always be “girls.” Their infantilization is not optional, but part and parcel of their bourgeois white heterosexual femininity. While the white, male, heterosexual slacker almost always has to “grow up” to become an adult man, Kessler’s reading of infantilization as “part and parcel of... bourgeois white heterosexual femininity,” offers a crucial perspective on notions of arrested development and how they circulate and operate differently based on the categories of race, gender, sexuality, and class. 131 Kessler, Sarah. "Working Girls." Public Books. 10 January 2014 <http://www.publicbooks.org/artmedia/ working-girls>. 212 As I have attempted to show in my reading of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, the non-white slacker inhabits temporalities that at times mirror those of the white, male slacker, while also offering challenges to characterizations of the arrested development of people of color, suggesting that it is white men whose development is arrested both with regard to maturation but more importantly with regard to racial politics. Indeed, if racial progress represents a challenge to white power, the films suggest, then arrested development may be the preferred temporality of whites who are unwilling to relinquish it. With regard to the role that work plays in these films, they also offer insights and challenges into the model minority mythos that continues to affect dominant representations of Asian Americans in the U.S., by challenging perceptions of an oftentimes naturalized and racially inherent work ethic that so often accompanies discussions of Asian Americans’ success, both economically and with regard to narratives of assimilation. Moving beyond the Asian American slacker-stoner, an expanded version of this project would look to other examples of non-white slacker films, which are often also stoner comedies, such as Cheech & Chong’s Up in Smoke (1978) and Friday (1995), to explore the ways in which laziness and ambition are figured into those films. In Friday, for example, the laziness of the film’s stoner duo is informed, in part, by the impact of deindustrialization on the black, urban, working class. Additionally, an exploration of the impact of neoliberal economic and “law and order” policies on black, working class culture, for example, gangsta rap as an emergent, popular cultural formation during the late 1980s and early 1990s would enable a more comprehensive exploration of the impacts of neoliberalism in the formation of a variety of slacker types. 213 While this project has focused primarily on the white, middle, class, heterosexual, male slacker whose idleness is often enabled by the privileges that have accrued to him, my interest in the inventive ways that slackers compensate for the drudgery of work is itself indebted to Robin Kelley’s work on the black working class. In Kelley’s introductory account of his experiences working at a central Pasadena McDonald’s in 1978 in Race Rebels, he recalls “That we were part of the ‘working class’ engaged in workplace struggles never crossed our minds, in part because the battles that were dear to most of us and the strategies we adopted fell outside the parameters of what most people think of as traditional ‘labor disputes.’” 132 That the forms of work that we often attribute to privileged subjects, the types of work that some might even be envious of if for nothing more than the incomes they provide, also elicit such responses cannot be simply understood as borne of the laziness of entitled and ungrateful people. Rather, what they suggest is that work itself—regardless of income or status—may be the problem. In his review of Richard Linklater’s 1991 film Slacker, Owen Gleiberman writes that “the movie never loses its affectionate, shaggy-dog sense of America as a place in which people, by now, have almost too much freedom on their hands.” 133 The many characters we encounter are able to take this freedom and engage in forms of “useless” intellectual exchange and oddball conversation. They take the time to simply enjoy the pleasures of not having to worry about what they might be expected or are supposed to do out of a sense of duty to the work ethic or obligation to the dictates of normative life. Slacker is more interested in capturing these moments of idle social engagement and 132 DuBois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy, 1860-1880. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935. 40. Quoted in Kelley, Race Rebels, 17. 133 Gleiberman, Owen. "Slacker (1991)." Entertainment Weekly. 2 August 1991. <http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,314993,00.html> 214 commitment to activity that do not fall within the usual parameters of what we consider to be “work” in order to show us precisely what freedom might look like, and enable us to imagine what freedom might look like for ourselves. 215 Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Edited and translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 1999. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004. —. The Promise of Happiness. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2010. Alberti, John. “’I Love You, Man’: Bromances, the Construction of Masculinity, and the Continuing Evolution of the Romantic Comedy.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 30:2 (2013): 159-172. 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Creator Wescott, Alex G. (author)

Core Title Arrested development: neoliberalism and the rise of the slacker in the 20th and 21st century United States

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 07/14/2014

Defense Date 05/13/2014

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