Body Mutilation

Both in Hair Badge! and in Branding!, I portray a character getting mutilated by common consumer products. (As if that ever happens!)

Am I some kind of sadistic freak? Perhaps. The point is that all of the products and ideas with which we interact effect us--maybe not always physically but often emotionally and intellectually. But it's difficult to communicate the emotional and intellectual violence of branding or industrialized personal grooming or ubiquitous environmental music in an audiovisual medium. Or in a written medium. It's much easier, and perhaps more effective, to let physical mutilation stand in for these non-physical effects, as a...shudder...metaphor (as opposed to a meta four).

I once heard some punk rock pioneer reflect on the initial punk movement in a radio interview (I think it was LA punk-rocker Nicole Panter) by saying that she tore up her clothes and mutilated her outward appearance partly to make everyone around her, all the "normal" people, feel the pain she felt on the inside. I don't remember whether she addessed this in the interview, but I believe conveying personal pain in this manner (torn clothing, safety-pinned eyebrows, skin "branded" by popular logos, etc.) also invites the viewer to recognize similar dissatisfaction within him/herself.

While adherents of the Disco-Cocaine-Contraceptives (DCC) and Reagan Conservatism movements (which overlapped more than you'd think) almost certainly didn't see the punk movement as offering valuable philosophical insights, hindsight shows us that punk ideas have influenced our current culture arguably as much as the mainstream ideas of that era. Today, 96% of the punk movement has been coopted by consumer capitalism--the personal pain has been bottled and sold and Punk is now one of the many sanctioned Youth Culture options. (Hooray! Being punk isn't just for Halloween anymore! But disco IS just for Halloween! So are Reagan and Nixon!)

That's part of the intent with these contrary videos that result in mutilation or minor violence--to convey the pain so that others might recognize it in themselves. And maybe, in the future, 20th Century Fox or General Electric or Kohls or RiteAid can make some serious money off this stuff.