Art, Porn and commercialisation: Cashback and Kill La Kill

This line of argument has been swirling around in my mind for a while and is far too large a topic for me to half-heartedly attempt to tackle in a single post, so this is the first part of a series of features that will seek to investigate the boundaries between art and porn and the role commercialisation can play in the crossing of these boundaries. By no means will this series be exhaustive of the subject matter, nor will it have definitive answers to any problems I discuss but I do hope it will provoke thought on the subject matter.

Edit: I made a video from this post, check it out here. Any feedback you might have would be greatly appreciated.

Firstly it should be noted that by “Art” I’m discussing forms of culture; be it movies, TV shows or traditional “high” art such as paintings and sculpture. By the same token “Porn” here refers to anything that is masturbatory, that is to say anything that is purely pleasurable or concerned only with gaining a positive emotional or physical reaction. To boil this distinction down into a crude example I would argue that American Beauty is a piece of culture; a movie that has great complexity and a barrage of intelligent concepts contained within, many of which challenge your perception of your own life, while American Pie is masturbatory, concerned with escapism, gross-out comedy and the wholesale objectification of women in order to appeal to a teenage male demographic. Subjectivity cannot be stressed enough here: if you think American Pie is a brilliant piece of satire or American Beauty is a pretentious load of wank you aren’t wrong: that’s entirely your opinion, but so is this article; in all probability you and I will not see eye to eye and that is not my aim at all. Bear these disclaimers in mind while reading the rest of this write-up. 

The first thoughts I started to have on this topic were largely formed by two events; the first was doing a week on “Mass Culture theory” in one of my University courses which argues that with the mass production of media for commercial purpose media becomes a calculated set of elements created specifically to be consumed; that it will only reflect and support the dominant ideas of the most profitable audience and is largely of no value to society in the way culture had been in the past. I don’t particularly agree with these assertions but I think in regards to the relationship between profitability and the likelihood of the value of the art/ culture/ media being lessened the theory does have a valid and perhaps even important point to make. The other event that spurred me on to writing these posts was an incredibly disappointing viewing of Cashback, a film that tried to advertise itself in the manner of an independent film with big ideas and clever visuals but utterly failed to meet my already partially sceptical expectations on either point.

Cashback, for context, follows a man who cannot sleep after his relationship ends badly and after having nothing better to do starts working night shifts at a supermarket. In finding the incredible boredom of his job he begins to discover that he can freeze time which he does in order to partially or wholly undress women in the store in order to draw them (he is an art student). Tack on to this an awkward romance and some of the shallowest representations of Women I have ever seen; particularly on-the-nose given how the film reeks of an appreciation of itself and how clever the ideas within it are (films like Groundhog Day and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind did more or less everything this film tries to do far better and didn’t make the mistake of making the main character a wooden plank that makes Daniel Radcliffe look like Daniel Day-Lewis). I went into this film with a cautious but sceptical optimism thinking the trailer was an amalgamation of all the worst parts designed to sell the film to people uninterested in the arthouse style it claimed to be a part of, an average trailer for an interesting movie, sadly the film was ultimately less interesting than the trailer and as a short-ish film of ~98 minutes one that astoundingly manages to say only what might have fit into a 3 minute YouTube video. Suffice to say I don’t recommend it.

Of course to imply that it was commercialisation that made the film as disappointing as it was would be naïve and plain stupid; but it certainly played a part. Cashback’s sensitive-artist-type protagonist is only interested in drawing attractive women and exclusively in a realistic style in black and white, pencil on paper. Fundamentally it shows very little understanding of art (the only art ever shown in a movie where two of the characters are students of an art school is in the exact same realistic pencil on paper style that in a real art school would be far from the only style represented) and in exclusively portraying attractive female subjects the film starts to lean on an offensively limited view of art as just visually pleasing, exclusively concerned with the skill of the artist and totally removed from any sort of vision; a type of art that I consider masturbatory and unappealing to my own sensitive-artist-type sensibilities and the less said on the female characters and their roles as plot-points for the male characters the better. Of course it would be far less attractive to audiences if the film stripped the male patrons, but as a film about the pursuit of beauty isn’t it awful that the film only shows it in naked supermodels? I could be wrong; maybe all the supermodels shop at night and the film is totally accurate but I very much doubt it and the complete exclusion of the average shopper, men or even women of any other ethnicity than Caucasian further reinforces a particular image of beauty; playing exclusively off of an exclusively hetero-centric white male perspective and the result is not art in the slightest as it may hope to be, but rather a self-indulgent love letter to a teenage obsession with women as an object of desire. Just as the women of the film are there to be looked at and appreciated for their beauty (and nothing else) the film offers nothing beyond breast flavoured eye candy.

So if Cashback was a film that advertised itself as smart and arty but ended up being anything but my next example is its antithesis; Kill La Kill an anime series I’ve already praised here advertises itself as focused on action with a pretty heavy emphasis on girls fighting in very little clothing but ultimately became my favourite anime and one of the most enjoyable series I have ever watched with a lot more to say than it appears at first glance. If beauty is only skin deep then Kill La Kill certainly looked shallow, but as you sink deeper you quickly realise the glimmer of the surface was merely a reflection of your own expectations (I certainly did not expect to particularly like Kill La Kill but it surprised me in just about every way possible) and the show itself is much more nuanced than that which one immediately sees or indeed expects to see. 

Kill La Kill has a similar focus on the female form to Cashback, and you will see repeated shots of all the main characters in skimpy clothing, however just about everything that Cashback does poorly or fails to do at all is done by Kill La Kill: both men and women are shown practically naked and the framing isn’t one that places the revealing positions characters are placed in to be disempowering; but rather one where women have equal power to the male characters (in Cashback the women are frozen and undressed at the hands of the man, in Kill La Kill characters for the most part chose to dress in revealing clothing, actually gaining power from doing so and men and women alike wear very little). It all has a point too, something I can’t say about Cashback, with statements about Japanese culture in regards to censorship and an extreme focus on education in particular areas being particular examples of elements of Japanese culture that is being directly criticised by the show. On top of all of this it is a powerhouse of feminist critique of cultural issues regarding how women and men are judged and treated differently with clever nods to the way students might modify their uniforms to carry this message. People might bring up the hem of their skirt or wear a shirt that is too small for them to accentuate their body and Kill La Kill doesn’t judge that action but rather celebrates it in the most over-the-top way it can; shoving our judgement back in our face and showing how stupid it is. Chris Kincaid wrote a great piece on this particular topic at Japan Powered, if you’re interested in feminism and Kill La Kill it’s a good read, check it out here. If you don't know anything about Kill La Kill check out this trailer to be totally misinformed on the show (although it's not that bad of a trailer despite its inaccuracy).

Where Cashback fails to say anything important Kill La Kill says everything it wants to, presenting important ideas and messages in a way that is entertaining and enjoyable for both their audience members that might agree with their ideals and those that might not; whether you think women should dress moderately or you think women shouldn’t be told how to dress Ryuko is an incredible and instantly likeable character; whether you think capitalistic desires, possessions and clothing bring you happiness or you think that material goods only get in the way of forming true happiness Mako’s family are as charming and kind to you as they are to Ryuko herself and whether or not you believe that certain rigid education systems are harmful to their students and even their students’ families the institution of Honnouji academy is fantastically oppressive as a school. Kill La Kill rides the line perfectly between what I consider to be art and what has clearly been shown to be commercially successful and stands as a very strong argument against Mass Culture theory for its ability to slip in subversive messages into a series that appears to aim itself at the very people that might hold many of the views the show criticises. 

Art for me has to do two things; one is to demonstrate an element of technical ability and the other is to have a message or set of messages that the audience will grapple with; all technical ability and no message and you’ll get a realistic portrait like those featured in Cashback; all message and no technical skill and you’ll get a blog post *cough cough*. Kill La Kill hits both marks perfectly; the art direction is B E A U T I F U L and the editing, music, dialogue, characters and ideas all live up to the wonderful visuals. Porn on the other hand, or rather masturbatory material in this case, has to show me a lot of shots of nude women (for the audience at large whatever gender etc. is their thing) with no message and nothing to think about to get in the way of the pleasure of the piece and while there might just be enough in the way of ideas to make it a stretch to call Cashback porn, for me it was purely masturbatory (not in the sense that it works as porn, but that it was little more than a weak romance and lots of nudity); deliberately leaving the more interesting ideas unexplored to leave room for more shots of naked women and right there's the reason I was so disappointed with Cashback; with more development it could have been a half decent film but it instead chose to cram in as much nudity as possible without ever remembering to have a reason for doing so.

So, that’s it for this post, the ones that follow will likely look more into the commercialisation aspect of my argument, this one didn’t dig into that side too much. I also expect to be digging into some traditional “high” art and perhaps some of the ways in which art appreciation and distribution has changed and the effect this has had on the distinctions I make between valuable culture and masturbatory material. As always if you have any advice, complaints, tips or opinions please share them with me; I very much want to improve my writing and feedback either positive or negative would be greatly appreciated.