--�·. : ··-·,----., ,•' ! \··I Sleaze queen Divine in Pink Flamingos. 808 THE TERRAINOF THE UNSPEAKABLE Pink Flamingos and the culture of trash DARREN TOFTS To me, bad rasre is whar enrertainmenc is all about. If someone vomits watching one of my films, it's like getting a standing ovation. John Waters 1 Theorizing crash culture presents cultural studies with some awk­ ward problems. The issue is not just che way crash culture rends co posicion irs audience with respect co gender and sexual policies. Ir is also chat rhe rerm is used both descriptively and normatively: ir designates a range of subcultural practices, but it also suggests a moral accirude , a cultural discourse on what is acceptable as representation - a discourse char emerged in overt confrontation wirh the guardians of high culture. In recent years the rerm has been used in rhe context of a continuing and increasingly sophisticated interest in che obscene, and also of a sustained intellectual inquiry inco rhe dynamics of populism and mass culture, and the conditions of production and consumption in post-industrial society. Within cultural studies there has been a rigorous critique of the ways in which crash culture has come co be understood, how it is used and by whom, and the ambiguous policical force it exerts within the domain of popular culture generally. Philip Brophy has distinguished between che rerm crash- ('all maccer of refuse ... all the material lefr over') and its erstwhile synonym, junk ('all rhe material injected, invited, avowed, support­ ed'), in cerms of their relation co the process of consumption (culture). Brophy's collaborative 'Trash and Junk Culture' exhibi­ tion of 19892 skilfully represented the extensive and hierarchical nature of crash culture, from the overtly visible (exploitation advertising, video nascies, pornograph�·) to che sublim�nal (body­ building and wresding magazines). The exhibition dramatized the extenr co which social reality is driven by consumption, and irs 809 rhemes of hunger, thirst, caste and appetite were contextualized in terms of the obsessive, the unhealthy and the unnatural. Described by ics producers as an ' educational exhibition recom­ mended for che whole family ', ic drew accention co itself, ironically or otherwise, as a reflexive commemary on crash. lnsticucionalized wichin che Australian Cencre for Contemporary Arc, che exhibition removed irs subject maccer from che concexcs in which ic was produced and circulated , and accordingly modified irs meanings; chis parricu­ lar collection of crash became something co be regarded and thought about as culrure . Increasingly, critical self-consciousness sanctions the representation of offensive material in the name of culcural critique. So, for example, Brophy's 1987 film Salt, Saliva, Spermand Sweat has been described as an 'essay film' about how sex and violence 'are used in contemporary cinema, and how "good caste" techniques ace used co seduce audiences', and Brophy himself has praised film-maker Russ Meyer for 'seriously dealing with the question, "What is pornography?'".3 If we see crash artefacts as constituting a meca-cric.ical poetics of the obscene, ir becomes possible ro focus on the ways in which we speak of che unspeakable and develop srracegies co legitimate its production and consumption.· When The Naked Lunch began co receive critical anenrion in Britain in the early 1960s, ic sparked a three- month diatribe in che hallowed pages of the Time.s Literary S11pplement. This reactionary crusade invoked all kinds of metaphors ro describe Burroughs' work, one of rhe most common being che analogy with walking through che drains of a big city. The underlying moral objection to Burroughs, which unified rhe views of all his derraccors, was neady summarized in the description of The Naked L11nch as life-denying , 'bogus-highbrow filch'; 'spiritually as well as physically disgusting, and casteless to an almost incredible degree, it offends against value of any kind . .. every bir as much as against public decency'. 4 The so-called 'Ugh' correspondence (pub­ lished in 1982 as an appendix co che John Calder edition of the book) also contained responses from Burroughs' supporters, who argued that Burroughs' work amounted co an imporcanr exploration of che dark side of che human psyche, comparable co rhose of Sade and Baudelaire, Becken and Genec. In the 'Ugh' correspondence , as well as in critical apologias such as Susan Sontag's 'The Porno­ graphic Imagination' (1967), theories of the obscene developed defensively, as rejoinders co hostility and derision. In recent years, however, more assertive claims have been made. Andreas Huyssen, for example, has argued chac che chrusc of che historical avanc-garde of the firsr chircy or forty years of this cencury 810 was obliterated by conformism. s In his analysis of postmodernism and mass culcure Huyssen has noted a revival of rhe avanr-garde's subversive iconoclasm. It is not hard to subscantiate chis claim. The Nalud Lunch, for instance , has much in common wich Bataille's surrealist classic of agonistic eroticism, Story of the Eye. The blasphe­ mous, confrontational element in Bataille was ·icself reminiscent of Dada outrage, which, apart from the more traditional artistic forms (Duchamp's 'L.H.O.O.Q.') was channelled through public �pace, such as billboard posters and manifestos ('we demand che right tO piss in different colours,· Tristan Tzara asserted in 1916). The use of the public spectacle as a site of political subversion can be traced, as Greil Marcus has demonstrated, in the slogans and activities of the Siruationists of the L950s and the Sex Pistols in the late 1970s. 6 Similarly, as Frank Zappa has noted in a recent 'autobiography', the Mothers of Invention also conceived of their performances as Dada events. One day, rhree Marines, in full dress uniform ... sat down in che front row . I asked them if they knew any songs. One of the guys said char, yeah, they knew 'House of the Rising Sun' and 'Everybody Must Gee Stoned'. I said, 'That's great. Would you guys like co sing wirh us tonighc? We'd just LOVE to have Marines singing on scage with us'. They said, yeah, they would. I said, 'Go across the Street w che Tin Angel, have a few drinks, and come back when the show is on'. When they came back , I brought them up on stage -although it must have been against regulacions for them ro do this kind of thing in full dress -and had them sing 'Everybody Muse Get Sconed'. By that time they were preuy well wrecked, so 1 suggested, 'Why don't you show the folks in the audience what you guys do for a living'. I handed them a big baby doll and said, 'Suppose you just pretend chat this is a "gook baby".' They proceeded to rip and mutilate the doll while we . played. It was tt"Uly horrihlt. After it was over, I thanked them and, with a quiet musical accompaniment, showed the ruined parts of the doll to rhe audience. Nobody was laughing. 7 The representat ion and exploration of prohibited aspects of experience has been a staple of the histOrical avanr-garde, and has brought about a liberation of the body as macter, as an 'organism of accivicy and consumption, digestion and evacuation. (Brophy's display of 'gross-out coys', which seem ro cucn the body inside out, makes it dearthat this neo-Rabelaisian attention to the body can be found in the mosr 'innocent' and unex�!<:red places.) The body has always been something of a cultural cerror in Westecn art and morality, and avant-gardism has never been fully accepted as a 811 reasonable excuse or occasion for its display. When Ezra Pound, that staunch advocate of the new, removed a reference co masturbation from a typescript of the 'Nausicaa' episode of UlymJ, he was reinforcing a cultural assumption of his own time chat vecy few of the body's secretions are mentionable. 8 Similarly, Virginia Woolf had to forgo her initial solidarity with Joyce when his characters began to menstruate or urinate. When the American ban on U/yJJes was finally lifted in 1933, the Hon. Judge John Woolsey comment­ ed that Joyce's treatments of the body were emetic rather than pornographic - a statement chat apdy expresses the Manichaean conception of the body as something that repels rather chan excites. The conflarion of the prohibited and the unnatural is provisional, and changes as morality comes co grips wich new attitudes to censorship, permissiveness and sexuality. Menstruation, defecation and urination all feature nowadays in television commercials, usu­ ally in relation co produces chat either conceal them or keep them under control (the removal of condom commercials suggests that ejaculation is scill de trop on television). But they also feature in less contiguous, more casual ways, such as men discussing insurance while assembled unselfconsciously at the urinaL When represencations of che body chat were once considered taboo now turn up in something as pervasive as advertising, it is clear chac the terrain of the unspeakable has fairly flexible boun­ daries. Susan Sonrag's now famous articulation of 'camp sensibiHcy' is useful in identifying how purveyors of the obscene have had to reinterpret and extend the boundaries of che unacceptable to keep ahead of a culture chat manages to absorb and defuse the transgres­ sive. In her 1964 essay 'Notes on "Camp'", Sontag describes a modern sensibility that is marked by arcifice and the 'spirit of extravagance'. Camp is an exaggerated and self-conscious deca­ dence, an elaborate and overdone indulgence in che 'off'. 9 It is all a question of self-consciousness and degree, for even rhe most recuper­ ated image or suggestion can shift from good to bad tasce through overuse, exploitation or rheatricalization.