Confusion with audio-visual equipment mean that I couldn’t show the clip I meant to show in my first lecture. It’s designed as an amusing illustration of my argument, but it embodies some central aspects of the issues I was discussing around the inevitable trend of internet communication towards the erotic, as well as attitudes, mechanisms and self-conscious play which are highly characteristic of internet culture. Here it is, with some commentary in rather more detail than I had time for in the lecture.
Avenue Q is an off-Broadway musical which uses Sesame-Street-style puppets to explore the challenges and disillusionments of growing into young adulthood, and to contrast the idealised simplicities of a child’s world-view with the difficulties of the real world. This clip is a fan-made interpretation of the song “The Internet is for Porn” from the musical, but using machinima techniques – that is, using the characters and movement possibilities of a video game engine to generate what is effectively low-quality cinematic sequence which can be synchronised with a song to make a music video. The game engine in this instance is early-generation World of Warcraft, which explains the weird fantastic-creature characters and general air of pixelation.
For the purposes of these lectures, there are several interesting aspects to the clip.
- The song itself is highly satirically aware of the prevalence of porn on the internet, and parodies the naïveté of the female voice in believing that porn is a marginal rather than normative feature of internet communication. Nonetheless, her excitement about the internet’s potential directly mirrors those aspects of it which also link it inevitably to erotic expression: instant gratification (“I’ve got a fast connection so I don’t have to wait”), freedom of access as well as privacy and intimacy in the interaction between individual and internet (“Right from your own desktop”), and breadth of possibility (“untold opportunity… / You can research and browse and shop”). The interspersed “For porn!” refrain is an amusing enactment of the erotic’s tendency to hijack any form of communication and turn it to erotic ends.
- This is a fanvid: that is, it’s been loving created by fans who have considerable and affectionate investment in Avenue Q (and presumably also a lot of time on their hands), and who are thus driven to interaction and commentary rather than simple consumption. It is no longer enough to simply watch the musical: the impulse is to appropriate, sample, reshape and re-interpret it, and then to re-distribute it in an ongoing dialogue which looks for response and a reassurance that the insight is valid and the investment is shared.
- This particular commentary – the World of Warcraft setting – is in some ways mocking (clearly the internet is also for World of Warcraft, a use not mentioned by the song, as well as porn), but it’s also validatory of the song’s essential message, that communications will be hijacked, and that the internet is above all about appropriation as self-expression. Here it’s consumer artefacts as much as art which are diverted into a personalised use which meets personalised needs at the same time that it permits active engagement with the text. Porn and World of Warcraft are thus being equated as self-indulgent but equally central forms of self-indulgent internet activity.
- As a fan response it also exemplifies the common tendency for fans to engage in simultaneous multiple discourses of fandom – to be as invested in World of Warcraft as they are in Avenue Q, and to use one area of investment and specialised knowledge to comment on the other, and to generate humour via deliberately bizarre juxtapositions. (This sort of impulse can also be seen in crossover fanfic, or in fan fiction which features song lyrics or references to other pop-culture texts as a secondary layer of identification).
- The interpretation of the song is fundamentally playful and highly self-aware, making self-conscious use of technological abstraction to generate humour by playing intertextual games. It also incidentally comments on the musical’s own real-life format, which places the puppets’ handlers visibly on stage without commentary, and requires suspension of disbelief to accept the clearly artificial puppets as characters in their own right.
This beautifully shadows the kind of suspension of disbelief any computer gamer engages in when investing in their (unrealistic, idealised or inhuman, badly-pixelated) avatar as an extension of their own identity.
You can find lyrics for the song at http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/avenueq/theinternetisforporn.htm; that page also has a clip of the actual performance of the song from the Broadway musical, with the puppets.