IN THE MULTIVERSE OF AMERICAN BIOPOLITICAL MADNESS

Anyone who hasn’t seen at least one Marvel film in the last twenty years is probably either the most obnoxiously pretentious person you’ve ever met, or Amish. I’d be lying if I said that at one point I wasn’t eagerly awaiting the next MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) instalment like a kid counting the days til Christmas, or a bath-house top lining up for a piece of the pillow princess in the sling. Bottom line, in the recent past I have been very very on board, having even committed that cardinal sin of trying to explain the MCU’s current status to those who might’ve seen one or two Phase One (of four) movies and otherwise envy the fanfare of an upcoming property—whose envy evaporates when I slip into the condescending tone of a history lesson (unavoidable). That said, I’m currently in the throes of Marvel fatigue and haven’t even bothered with their last few Disney+ shows. However, on seeing Sam Raimi at the helm of a Doctor Strange sequel I allowed myself some tentative excitement, and after watching the thing can confidently say I’m on board again (for the minute anyway).

But what’s struck me as even more interesting than Marvel pivoting hard from its generic action-movie chops with a Raimi outing, is the bizarre metaphysics of the multiverse which, between Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and A24 film Everything Everywhere All At Once, seems to have landed in the zeitgeist with osmotic understanding and appeal. Now the MCU has always dealt with unwieldy time-space law, usually to ratchet up the stakes as these tend to diminish twenty or thirty films in. Often the MCU’s more fantastical elements are excuses to deploy digital trickery, reflexively amplifying the pro-technology pro-military stance which its consistent threat-and-security propulsion implies. By habit Marvel movies have a formulaic trajectory of isolation and containment which scales of space and even time travel merely buttress, just as magic scaffolds the anti-fascism of the Harry Potter movies, or technology and dystopian futurism couches the anti-authoritarian takeaways of the Hunger Games. But here in the Doctor Strange sequel, it struck me as odd that the multiverse would be so readily conceptualised (and publicly embraced) as it questions the validity of everything coming before it as just one variant in a countless number of variable timelines—seemingly counterintuitive for a franchise which has spent the better part of two decades building a specifically detailed mythology. Even more interesting is its practically parallel release-date with Everything Everywhere All At Once, which despite its indie trimmings was as high profile a release, and which similarly riffs on a multiverse metaphysic; to different ends sure, but still furiously committed to this notion of spurious reality, or the redundancy of single variants amidst a mathematically infinite number.

The following, then, is an exploration of what a popular conceptualizing of the multiverse might mean, at this specific moment in time, packaged in two commercially successful properties which have already made the kind of impact that speaks to some peremptory generalized notion which these films merely crystallize. We’ll start by looking at Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness, and then Everything Everywhere All At Once, before examining where these overlap—if at all—and whether the MCU’s residual obsessions with militarized applications of technology (including the occult) have contributed to the collective apprehension of the multiverse as it’s independently conceived, irrespective of either film.

i) IN THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS (MoM); big data, predictive analytics, & biopolitics

In MoM Wanda Maximoff aka The Scarlet Witch waxes lyrical about there being a myriad of possibilities in the multiverse. An infinite number actually—for every problem a solution, for every sickness a cure, for every unmitigated disaster an unequivocal remedy. The idea is an alluring one, endlessly attractive. For villain Scarlet Witch the temptation proves too much. Desecration of natural law ensues—so we’re told—in which the dicta of self-interest sees Wanda taking any life that stands in her way and bending to the Dark Hold, an ancient grimoire which bears demonic intent of its own and contaminates any acolyte persuaded by the promise of absolute control. Because that’s what Wanda seeks, control of the unforeseen, totalizing omnipotence whereby the powers of disaster are matched with simultaneous absolution—pilfered from an alternate universe.

There is an obverse object—a light book standing opposite the dark—called the Book of Ashanti. Though there’s implicit judgement and anxiety around the Dark Hold—that anyone reckless enough to resort to its logics risks derailing reality (and their soul)—it is the Book of Ashanti which is sought during a kinetic second act; sought for its promise of whatever a magician needs for his or her purpose. Much like Wanda’s quote-unquote ‘selfish’ approach, reaching from one universe into another for a pathway towards the objects of her desire (her sons). It remains to be seen then just how these magical tools differ, seemingly in name only and the musical and visual aesthetics between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ with which they’re served.

There is so much here like Big Data, or so much resembling the mythic around Big Data and predictive analytics—that information is enough to quell the unknown now and forever, that life can be triumphed over by tallying its deterministic trajectories and planning accordingly, that life is categorically deterministic and can be navigated as such in the first place. A spurious premise. Arguably this is the moral, in as much Steven Strange justifies taking a life early on in the film as warranted, given the gargantuan calculus of the multiverse. With all of life and even its hypothetical waypoints reduced to a totalizing metric, the primer for enlightened organization is an unimpeachable utilitarianism. Furthermore, each grimoire—the light and the dark—seem merely to hold space for semantic modalities in an existing program, as that program’s generative binary. Far from canons of good and evil, the Dark Hold and Book of Ashanti represent originary code in which their narrative camouflage of moral polarity describes not mythic conflict but integrated functional supplements.

All of this gives the impression that mathematics is the grand-nay-divine script overseeing the cosmos and its endless tangents, with humans as blips in its endless unfolding, tasked with meaning-production on a planet whose significance seriously diminishes against a cultivated multiversal proportion. In such a metric any and all human doing implies causal quantification, meaning every action exists in a hermetically sealed mathematical necessity. In this existential equation there is no autonomous remainder, so much so that even dreams have utility in this fractally reticulated rubric. In MoM Strange and cohort realise dreams, far from the speculative processing of the unconscious, are in fact glimpses into the lives of alternate selves. Seemingly innocuous, this metaphysical feature of the multiverse alleges that nothing which doesn’t already exist can be conjured into being, because everything already does exist somewhere, constrained by an admittedly spacious ground but constrained all the same. Constrained by what? By the manifest laws of existence themselves, that unholy multiversal mathematics again. In this mathematics the notion of surplus is an absolute impossibility.

Another Marvel film, Eternals, points to just who this mathematical-existential utility might be serving. In Eternals, the titular figures are immortal beings sent to planets to oversee the development of hominid species, ushering history with a light hand along certain vectors with guidelines from cosmic employers—celestials—to interfere in human endeavour only up to a point. Beyond this history is to take its own course, for better or worse. It comes to light with Earth’s own set of eternals that the culmination of their work is the planet’s destruction as an incubator for another celestial, that throughout the ages whole planets have existed merely to birth this massive cosmic species, with the surface activity of each planet’s hominids generating energy towards a full celestial term—at which point a celestial is born and that planet destroyed. The theme of imperial or civilizational activity serving resource demands in a tiered stack is well-trod ground in science fiction, an idea famously mainstreamed with The Matrix franchise (which just won’t die despite recent and heinous ideological drift as an alt-right property). But here it transcends Matrix’s technophobia and speculates creation itself is a cosmic engine geared for the energy requirements of ancient gods, human life itself a utility comprised of myriad closed utilities in a seemingly endless parasitic pyramid.

Again, there is no such thing as surplus in multiverse logics, presumably because everything in existence is tightly packed into this tiered stack of resource traffic, passing up and through successive beneficiaries until enough energy reaches its celestial overlord. This redundancy of surplus maybe inadvertently echoes the friction between two diametrically opposed disciplines—that of biopolitics, and that of psycho-analytics. Michel Foucault, maybe the grandaddy of biopolitics as we know it, detailed how the truth of the body was conceptualized through a genealogy of confession in and around sexual practices, which turned into a tallying thereof, which eventually graduated by late nineteenth and early twentieth century into a full-blown medicalisation of sex and sexuality. Obviously these historical forays were couched in Christian ethics, and yet a metaphysics of sin was gradually secularized and replaced with hierarchical expertise in which a canon of best and hygienic practice substituted the threat of damnation. These new logics of the body have since been internalized via an implicit contractual agreement that certain conduct codes require upholding in exchange for the shelter and benefits of a parent-state.

Alternatively psychoanalysis explores the ways in which bodies and minds interact, how experience is uniquely matriculated and narrativized in the ongoing process of subject formation. Here truth is a multiplicity and is gradually exhumed in the feedback between patient and analyst, as opposed to the biopolitical scalpel-pulls of a medically objectified stance in which the body is reality’s consummate ground. Obviously this is a reductively brief overview of either discipline (and they certainly have their overlaps of confession/disclosure), but the takeaway should be one is primed for extracting truth from the body (akin to oil-drilling or fracking), and the other relies on open-ended descriptors whereby a reality and its narrative mechanics forms in subtle increments. For psychoanalysis the process is as crucial to truth formation as the lumpen fact, where the biopolitical expectation is fixed to a result, or the means being functionally divorced from the ends and therein justified. Ultimately the difference rests on language, and a biopolitical denial of linguistic and sociological factors as significant material organisers, where psychoanalysis concerns itself with these factors almost exclusively.

I’m not attempting to make some sweeping statement that psychoanalysis is correct and biopolitics in its various iterations flawed, only that the multiverse as it’s presented in MoM (and by extension the Marvel Cinematic Universe) is decidedly biopolitical—in its impermeable maths, in its rigid science-magic laws, and in its enclosure of dreaming as symptomatically quantifiable. The notion of surplus is a singular premise in psychoanalysis, perhaps championed by Lacan more so than Freud (and yes I hate myself for mentioning both Freud and Lacan in the same sentence). For Freud dreams were faucets to this surplus that language reaches for, and which is arguably the formative ground of subjectivity—an impossible void at the centre of lived experience, and from which the personality is haphazardly cobbled together with trauma and scotch-tape. By respecting this generative surplus psychoanalysis proffers itself with provisional humility (I swear), whereas the biopolitical establishes from the get go no such surplus exists or is even relevant to its aims. And those aims, more often than not, are couched in profit incentives and technologized imperialism, germinating with industrial expansion and arriving organically at a totalizing liquid surveillance. A surveillance so liquid in fact that in MoM it can reach across universes through the keyhole of dreaming, turning what would otherwise be the dramaturgical expression of numinous surplus into potential security leaks.

Perhaps most biopolitical of all in MoM, America Chavez (a real and very ham fisted character name) has the ability to physically move between universes, and when Wanda attempts to extract this power from her it’s ethically tutted because it would kill her. This multiversal ability is America’s truth, physically embodied, without which she would literally die. Wanda subsequently chases and coerces America into doing her bidding with the threat of this lethal extraction, much like the harrowing biopolitical vectors that ultimately justify torture towards ends of national security. In The Subject of Torture (2015), Hilary Neroni examines the post-9/11 spike in shows and films depicting torture (or ‘extraordinary rendition’) as necessary methods of intelligence gathering. Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer in 24 gets an honourable mention, as do a series of mid-noughties torture-porn horror movies despite the latter lacking a context of espionage and security. Neroni’s thesis is that this content emerged semi-spontaneously, negatively stimulated by a mainstream precedent of biopolitical logics and the xenophobically conflated threat of Islamic terror. In each of her examples Neroni explores how torture, far from gratuitous, is frequently deployed within a rubric of biopolitical truth-extraction, or a belief that the body holds a revelation which correctly executed stimuli of either pain or pleasure can excise—and like America Chavez, most examples don’t survive the extraction.

ii) EVERYTHING EVEYRWHERE ALL AT ONCE (EEaaO); the human surplus of depression

Alternatively, Everything Everywhere All At Once proffers something of a counterpoint to Marvel’s biopolitically scaffolded multiverse. The film, a Chinese-American hybrid from indie purveyors A24, stars Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang, mother wife and laundress who suddenly finds herself in the midst of a multidimensional caper. A vague and darkling entity is chasing her through the multiverse, later revealed to be an alternate version of her own daughter Joy who wants this particular Evelyn for her anomalous abilities. These abilities are the result of having pursued a negative choice at every quantum crossroads, meaning this Evelyn is the worst possible version of herself in existence who thusly acts as a vacuum, making her potential for ‘verse jumping’—borrowing skill-sets from alternate selves—properly infinite. When this Joy and Evelyn finally face off Joy explains she’s been chasing Evelyn not to subsume her, but to have someone match her own negativity, someone else to understand the profound meaninglessness of inhabiting such a negative space, and then finally join her in a death march into the void she’s cobbled together by pulling iterations of every known universe into a single point (an ‘everything’ bagel, quite literally).

Where MoM finds narrative propulsion in the existential threat of ‘incursions’ (the collision and subsequent collapse of realities), EEaaO abides by no such mathematical laws and sees the traversing of multiversal selves in a more promiscuously carnivalesque light. The only existential threat comes from Joy, whose unbridled negativity sees her malevolently travelling the multiverse and colonizing alternates for her own purposes, which are vague and resolutely chaotic as her vendetta is against meaning itself—which she’s decided has no place in an infinite expanse whereby all identities and experiences are proportionately valueless. Where MoM’s cohort sees a means of profound problem solving and totalizing regulation, Joy’s grasp of the multiverse as a consummate traveller thereof is despair, a breakdown of meaning, an expanse so vast the project of meaning-making seems redundant. The only existential threat in EEaaO then is the one poised by lack of coherence, and the antinomic prospect of making infinity legible. In fewer words, the film’s villain is depression itself.

In The Politics Of Visual Pleasure (2018), Anna Buckman Rogers explores how the films of Sofia Coppola are essentially riffs on a single theme—a cultural fixation on surfaces and the evacuation of meaning this entails. In Coppola’s oeuvre these evacuations are tied to gendered imperatives, and the feminine indoctrinations of girlhood which reallocate existential rumination towards a visually coherent female identity. In doing so Coppola’s antagonists frequently find themselves victim to depressions as they’re unable to reconcile felt complexity to societal directives, nor are they able to properly perform these directives in the naturalized way they’re sold. Coppola’s films are aesthetically laboured then—so Rogers argues—to reflect this cleavage within conventional femininity between meaning and appearance (debatably the internal split of any gendered property), a stylistic choice which many tellingly male critics have misread as the indulgences of a lesser filmmaker (misogyny alert lol).

In a similar vein Joy is unable to find a naturalized mode of being within an infinite bevy of options, not a single universe aligning with a duplicitously fractious self. Joy, ironically, chooses to lean into her depression and follow it through to annihilation (ala Coppola’s the Virgin Suicides). Evelyn however refuses despair and shows Joy that all she’s missing is a specific focus or relationship, that her consummate view of the multiverse is too fixated on its totalizing gravity and subsequently misses the wealth of detail such an expanse necessarily affords. Essentially Joy’s been snagged by the quantifying biopolitical primer, and through coercive logics arrived at the spurious conclusion that a mathematically impermeable system is one better off having never existed at all. Caught in an absolutist framework with no margin for surplus, Joy chooses death. In a berserker finale though Evelyn persuades Joy to relinquish her commitment to the universal signifier of infinity and come back into local fields of the particular, one but not all of which includes a nuclear family unit. Because even gonzo multiverse capers have to have a pro-family coda, apparently. However, amidst a cavalcade of queering this lands with more sincerity than a tired Hollywood refrain—it is just one valid lifestyle choice among many.

iii) HEGEL; systemic flaws, multiverse bugs & gamification

Between the two films stances on multiverse mechanics have overlap but are otherwise diametrically opposed. Where MoM introduces a metaphysic legible via the idealized symmetries of predictive analytics, big data, and the fractal reticulations of biopolitical control, EEaaO proffers a multiverse that’s squishier and porous and retains that surplus around which the human project of meaning making is still possible, similar to the improvisational gesturing of free-form jazz (which I hate). In the latter though, an inability to grasp and harness this surplus—equivalent to ‘enlightenment’ (without self-seriousness or paedophile gurus)—results in programmatic deterioration, or depression, leaving the subject adrift in deterministic machinations over which they’ve little control, and at the mercies of fixed utilitarian premises. An assemblage of homogenizing values—functionality, efficiency, centralization—is the motor of a multiverse under duress of mathematical necessity, neutering the sociological and the cultural of any value or potency outside its potentially productive data harvest. Basically that ‘surplus’—designated as such and relegated to the humanities—is exteriorized, making of life a digestive tract, or a profoundly banal extractive process between points A (birth) and B (death).

Hegel, that German behemoth, pointed to the insanity of systems unable to hold space for this surplus, and how failing to do so has potentially ruinous effects. In his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), he sought with embarrassing ambition to delineate the ur-stucture of cognition itself, demonstrating how every premise (thesis) has a counter-premise (antithesis), and that this dynamic of polarity could stave off collapse and eventually find workable middle-ground (synthesis). Though such a grounded system might function impeccably for a time, Hegel also pointed out that most real-life systems are prey to entropy and degradation due to their retaining a necessary flaw which gradually dissembles them, bringing them back to ground for the process to begin anew, over and over, hopefully nearer to perfection with each plateau (though the delusion of linearity itself is arguably such a cataclysmic flaw). In this vein that surplus which biopolitics—and the logic of data analytics in its service— refuses to hold space for will conceivably trip it up, time and again, obstructing the ideal of social determinism which it sweats for. Without manufacturing space for surplus and/or contradiction, the Hegelian flaw will rip through a system like a weaponized bug. The very idea of mathematical precision, then, is its own worst enemy.

Despite their differences both films share a systems-prone imaginary aligned with Hegel, concerning this notional catastrophe of such a bug. For MoM, this bug is America Chavez, whose powers of multiversal manoeuvrability threatens every reality. Seemingly anomalous, America remains a mathematical anomaly accounted for across the spectrum of realities, because across them she has no alternates, making of her a living Hegelian flaw whose untethered-ness gives her profound freedom from an otherwise deterministic grid. In EEaaO these flaws are dual, in characters Evelyn and Joy, whose unique verse jumping abilities grant them a similar omniscient freedom, but whose intrinsic negativity is an existential threat to the positivized probability engine of the multiverse.

Furthermore, the treatments of all three characters bears similar shape and points to a generalized notion of systems gleaned via gamification, and an implicit understanding that game theory is the singly viable approach navigating systems in which values are pitilessly exteriorized. For America this is present in an arc of properly unlocking and harnessing her ability, which in MoM’s beginning she can only do haphazardly. Once she’s able to do this the narrative is resolved and everyone finds a stabilizing course of action and their suitable multiversal allotment—leaving the mathematical necessity of the multiverse intact. For Evelyn and Joy, however, this gamification only serves them to a point, with verse-jumping and the pilfering of skill-sets from alternates rendered redundant by Joy’s unbridled (and disastrously positivized) nihilism. This mirrors a central logic of predictive analytics and data harvesting, which has access to a bottomless trove of potentially productive ‘assets’, but which is useless without human nuance (couched in ‘surplus’) to guide it towards discerning applications.

iv) IN SUMMARY; the multiverse as nihilism & multilateralism

Why of all concepts the multiverse should land in the zeitgeist with such resounding fanfare is tricky to unpack, but these films, and the wider biopolitical logic of the MCU (barely touched on here), give some indication as to why we’re so fascinated. With the MCU in particular, the fascination is an organic arrival point of a canon otherwise obsessed with militarization, specifically pitted against existential threats to an increasingly technologized order of arch capitalism. Throughout the MCU technology and terror (domestic or cosmic) are mainstays, with additives of Nietzschean supermen whose untold collateral on civilian heads is justified by a post 9/11 jingoistic adage of security in the homeland. It’s not uncommon now in a post-Watchmen comic milieu for this conceivably oligarchic divide between civilians and supers to be a central theme, more often than not a commentary on American exceptionalism (ala The Boys) and its lack of accountability for frequently aggressive foreign policy—euphemized in a shifting rubric of democratic values.

In this light the multiverse via MCU is arguably an attempted engagement with an emergent multilateral world, or one split into tangents from the half-century in which America was a global hegemon. This would perhaps make MoM’s America Chavez a stand-in for the US’s fluctuating relationship with the Global South, with even more profound implications for EEaaO being a Chinese-American production, considering the long chequered relationship between the two countries. Beyond this the ennui of Joy in EEaaO is perhaps symptomatic of anyone living in a post-truth era, whereby singular narratives couched in journalistic credibility are all but purged in a rampantly technologized free-for-all of hysteria, conspiracy, and misinformation—not necessarily hate-espousing but dizzying nonetheless.

Furthermore, Joy’s inertial refusal to grapple with an overwhelming multiplicity of realities and voices caricatures an almost immunological response to shifting social mores, in which contemporary political complexity is frequently met with an enraged populism. So much of this populist rage is valid (and decidedly conservative), in as much as it comes from cross-sections otherwise disenfranchised from legitimate political participation and forced to impotently spectate an arena which circuitously determines its own material security, all while entrenched biopolitical manoeuvres make it harder and harder to exist without extensive real-time disclosures—so we’re told, for the sake of coherence and efficiency. For anyone similarly exhausted by such a grid—in which the articulation of identity is a commodity vector—the idea of a multiverse, and in that multiverse a reality less constrained by such vectors, is a highly seductive notion. For decades, with a conspicuous spike in the late nineties and early two thousands via Roland Emmerich, the disaster movie and its promise of a clean slate was symptomatic of just such a socio-political exhaustion, a wish-fulfilling dramaturgy of an apocalypse which might clear a hopelessly compromised reality with the promise of renewal. It appears that the multiverse caters to the same fantasy, even while immunologically taking on the political multiplicity of a (allegedly) multilateral world.

However, both films finish with discrete codas of hope. For EEaaO, almost as a counterpoint to the biopolitics of Marvel, the film concludes with Evelyn happily cleaving to one flawed reality while listening in squishy wonder to all those neighbouring ones, presumably ready to experiment in the one by insinuation of the many—not verse jumping for quick fixes, but transcending this gamified logic as a passive recipient of the multiverse’s sublime scale. In MoM this transcendence isn’t so much attained as endured in a return of the Hegelian flaw. With everyone happily sorted into their respective realities (except Wanda who kills herself, oopsie) Steven Strange is all but gloating in his nimble deflection of incursion for his or any reality. The mathematical harmony of the multiverse is intact. And yet, just before the close, he sprouts a sinister third eye, opening him up to that surplus which his home-world grid otherwise denies. Thusly in MoM the multiverse is doomed to suffer catastrophe over and again under a biopolitical regime—robustly exacted by The Avengers, among others—which refuses to enclose negative space for externalities, or that which it hasn’t already totalized. Those contradictions it lacks precepts for will always come back ala the return of the repressed.

Long Live Hegel. And Sam Raimi.

death by Paglia--not a bash I swear

This new conservatism is killing me, even more so considering it’s been born of a will to subversion, traditionally a liberal imperative towards cultural disruption etc. Angela Nagle talks about it in Kill All Normies (2017), citing how the alt-right has hijacked sixties-era transgressivism to disseminate ideas wildly out of sync with the emancipatory incentives such tactics are usually trafficked from. Basically what’s gotten me miffed is seeing Camille Paglia sound-bytes on my feed, over and over again, her crepuscular dulcet tones detailing the fall of Rome and its decadent precursor, drawing comparisons between the alleged hubris of that period and contemporary society to fear-monger about how ‘The West’ has been derailed by liberal agendas. We are apparently now hurtling towards a similar implosion or bloody finale, woe betide anyone just trying to get by in this grand eschatological closing act. Boooooriiiiiiiing.

In whatever interview it is this Paglia snippet has her relaying in characteristic nasality how excessive tolerance for degenerative lifestyles, including gay marriage, are the death knell of a once great empire, glossing over the details exactly but concluding that this is symptomatic of liberalism’s shortsightedness, which she’d presumably say consists of dialectically proffering civic liberties to categorically marginalized identities without bothering to factor in the broader structural ripples such concessions may or may not lead to. I wouldn’t give a fuck usually—because this almost fashionable conservatism has been an annoying ambience for some time—but I’ve seen several pro-Paglia bytes now in the last few days circulating on Red Scare loving accounts (with tens of thousands of followers), meaning accounts administered by self-conscious Gen Z intellectuals who in the style of Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova performatively deploy their polarizing reading sensibilities and proto-fascist leanings, less from a fealty to such ideas and more towards the edge-lord clout grab. Affective rendering of intellectualism as nothing more than vain aesthetics is nothing new. But when an otherwise benign channel becomes vehicle for potentially violent regression, or when fashion starts seeding hate, it gives reason to pause.

Another Paglia byte doing the rounds has her bemoaning the proverbial Soft Boy, not in those internet 2.0 words but close enough. Basically she thinks men, in labouring to uphold feminist dicta, establish a mummy-son relationship with all the women in their lives, a dynamic she perceives as detrimental to proper gender equivalence as per feminism’s earnest remit. I can’t say I disagree with her—and floating around the art scene for a decade and counting racks you up a valid distrust in soft-spoken self-hating men, that’s for sure—but in the same breath I wouldn’t lionize the toxic masculinities of a bygone era, if only because they are most certainly not exclusive to a bygone era, and anyone arguing as such is either deluded, or has never spent a significant amount of time in New Zealand, or maybe lives in a goddess-commune where the men are tolerated for their seed and then dutifully discarded (I’m guessing somewhere in Titirangi? Sounds lit).

I think the most concerning thing for me is this mode of dissemination that takes a thinker’s more polarizing stances completely out of context, and circulates these along emergent lines of a binarily exhumed climate of exhaustion with criticality, that would prefer salacious bytes over coherent premises and a throughline of actual discourse. Ideological drift is nothing new, but the frictionless drift of social media along a dyadic chain of likes and follows and their opposite, makes an alluringly easy channel for this drift—the ideological equivalent of a tarpaulin lawn-slide covered in detergent.

I can’t say I’m overly familiar with Paglia, but the idea that excessive liberalism (and the emphasized attention to social issues this comes with) is lethal to civilization as we know it is embarrassingly simplistic, and less generously a symptom of social myopia—hate to be that bugbear, but more often than not a complaint ignorant of marginalization and its frequently entrenched biases, with little direct experience therewith. To be fair to Paglia (do I have to be?) this isn’t even to say that I’m a huge fan of marriage equality, as a superficial example. If anything the institution of marriage could’ve done with an overhaul for everybody (off the top of my head, women?), and not just the gays for whom the issue was dangled with performative fanfare, amplifying the unequivocal myth that progress is a linear trajectory ala Space Mountain, a ride between two clear points with a long-awaited crescendo of utopian thrill. Which I think might be the point. This myth of progress, as spurious as Fukuyama’s premature eulogizing of History superseded by American-style liberal globalization, lingers against a multilateral reality which has inevitably exhausted it, and which will continue to do so—the end result being a residual grief over a harmonized future that never happened, and probably never will happen.

It is perhaps from this exhaustion that we find ourselves in an embittered climate, with a specific bitterness against the insurmountable complexities of a compromised reality, and in that exhaustion a burgeoning culture of despair that has fanged humour and desperate shock tactics—with the lure of clout—as its voluble proviso. This really isn’t a Paglia bash and I’m swerving as hard as I can to stop it being as much, but with Paglia as an exemplar of pseudo-intellectual engagement, in as much as a thinker’s most polarized points are essentially commoditized amidst online communities of ironic hate, a Paglia renaissance seems to flag inertial populist responses to world disorder. This populism we could call post-Trump, post-covid, and post-truth, negatively stimulated by various existential threats and culminating in a general critical lethargy, captured and disseminated through viral metrics primed for the clout of the Hot Take. What’s more, it recycles ancient conservative adages which proffer the flux of existing gender orders as the scapegoat du jour for said disorder, mistaking the symptom for the cause and vice versa. If gender is an historical dialectic and its expression contingent on material processes that place certain bodies in certain relationships (and I’m pretty sure it might be), then gender itself is symptomatic of a greater premise, itself hybridized of less than concrete factors—making the idea of gender as societal litmus largely incoherent. Thusly, any new script bemoaning excessive permissiveness ala Sodom & Gomorrah does not in fact have a mind to civilizational longevity, because it’s concerning itself with expressions of Ur-text and not the text itself. So sorry to Paglia but I’m praying her little Gen-Z moment will be blessedly short-lived.

GRIMES—how we’re feeling now; a love letter, a query.

INTRODUCTION

The video for recent single Player of Games from Canadian ‘pop’ artist Claire Boucher-aka-Grimes is a parodic orgy of cinematic high fantasy, and if you can look past the fact the Sauron-looking romantic counterpart/antagonist is meant to be Elon Musk, then it’s a beautiful vignette of post break-up wounding which I couldn’t help but find completely stirring. There’s of course a renewed production budget for Miss Boucher’s work now, having spawned with a noted billionaire. But her creative vision remains, which here is still predictably maximalist. If anyone expected a maturation of the Grimes project, maybe a streamlining of ideas, then we are also perhaps pleasantly disappointed. The incorrigible maximalism of previous outings is still here, and as a taster we can assume the rest of Book 1 will be as unwieldy in it’s fusion of pop-cultural fixations and gamer-friendly visuals as anything she’s done before.

But what of Grimes in relation to Elon Musk? Certainly her profile has changed significantly since her relationship with Musk, that mega-capitalist whose unethical practices (including funding a Bolivian coup to obtain mining rights to industrial metals) have put Boucher in the firing line for proxy criticisms—such as the strangely amoral-apolitical flavour a proximity to Musk gives her brand of fantastic futurism. At one point prior to the release of Miss Anthropocene—an album that strives to profile the pending geologic-cataclysms which Musk and his hyper-techno-industrialist ilk are arguably responsible for—Boucher posted with allusions to her art-couched life being an exercise in ‘corporate surrealism’. As an aesthetic-fashioning of self close to monied frontlines most of us will never get a whiff of, how much of this is art, how much of it irony, and to what extent are we as an audience meant to separate art from artist and swallow this type of increasingly propagandised ‘pop’?

The following won’t be directly answering this question. Rather, I’ve spent time with the question merely to seek my own renewed commitment to an artist whose work has captivated to date, and which to my mind does so the more in light of the complexity Musk brings; like a shadow-presence whose exit from the in-frame Grimes project will indelibly have left a trace—if only because Boucher has consistently used her art to mirror reality (hers and ours) in ways which transcend the conventions of the genre.

In the four succeeding sections I’ll try and tease out just how Grimes has grappled with not just an extremely visible and vilified relationship, but also how she’s uncannily deconstructed the pop-artist cliches while still loosely inhabiting that space as a fluidly evolving avatar-version of herself. The first section is split in two, detailing in brief the narrative and aesthetic trajectories of recent albums Art Angels (2015), and Miss Anthropocene (2019). The remaining three sections will explore how the many thematic junctures from these albums braid together numerous textual and historical traditions of playful semiotic resistance, pushing back on various instrumentalities ala The Frankfurt School—perhaps especially her nearly-literary deployment of cosplaying and pastiche, and also how Player of Games (as the lead single from a forthcoming album) paves the way for her most insightful, and perhaps her most fraught, critique of life in late-stage capitalism. Hopefully by our conclusion it will be clear that demonising Boucher isn’t nearly as rewarding as thinking with and around her, even if for some the objective will be to think through her.

MISS ANTHROPOCENE, ART ANGELS; READYING PLAYER ONE BOOK ONE

i) MISS ANTHROPOCENE (2019)

The prettily enraged despair of Miss Anthropocene had all the hallmarks of a Grimes album—a welding of pop and experiment to baroque pantheons in the style of previous outing Art Angels—as well as being something of a revisionist methodology around the blasted-out guitars of nineties alternative. Despite Grimes having sworn off acoustics post-Art Angels, Miss Anthropocene sees the strings returning here, if only to be crowded and shredded with digital trickeries the likes of which drew Boucher’s original pop-leaning fan base in albums one to three (notably Visions which saw her crossing over from obscurity into indie stardom).

Genre-nods aside you couldn’t confuse this album with any other artist’s. A guitar, for Boucher, is more than a guitar, and with the exception of Delete Forever (a morose track detailing the loss of certain friends to heroin addiction), a guitar never appears nakedly—it is always present as an idea, a musical given layered with pointedly contemporary rhythm and sound. Pointedly because in her regurgitation of fantasy/science fiction/manga-tropes Grimes is a nostalgic futurist, rifling through discarded possibilities which for whatever reason never came to fruition (famous examples; hover-boards and flying cars by 2019?) and braiding these together to perhaps distill from them the optimism which is their vestigial impetus. Which is to say, nostalgias (like guitar-sounds) are packaged initially as wish-worlds away from intolerable presents, as Zygmunt Bauman makes clear in his treatise on Time as an aestheticised commodity (Retrotopia, 2016).

Boucher’s point of difference as a trafficker of futures past is that she encompasses so many of these past-futures—in various aesthetic forms—that a Grimes album is a miniature jubilee, a gathering of nostalgias so carnivalesque that their initial vigour is renewed. Her painted figures are so numerous, so saturated with hypertextual flags, that their settings are abolished and they are independently restored as icons of forward-moving re-conceptualisation (with allusions to the sublime; more on that later).

This is even more different with Miss Anthropocene from the usual deployment of such tactics because her own avowed thesis for the album was to fashion a pantheon of New Gods, making of the album a deliberate project towards transcending pastiche ala Frederic Jameson, seeking to model pop-cultural artefacts veined with the New rather than posit a self-serious Frankenstein comprised of older parts (the fetid practice of most of her peers—Ariana Grande, Katy Perry, Dua Lipa, Lorde, and with absolute affection, Lady Gaga). This is self-consciously avantgarde aesthetics, work which openly refers to the ritualised mechanisms of aesthetics even as she’s singing/dancing/mixing—in fewer words, art about art; even speculating on the divine nature of art as a mediumship primed for birthing the godly.

That these alleged gods (one for each track apparently) were meant as heralds of the Anthropocene—which Boucher figures as a sword-toting Kali-like goddess of planetary extinction—positions Boucher as a weaver of numinous mythologising and secularity, sacralising as she does processes of geologic degradation/transformation to girdle a thinkable interface with what is essentially unthinkable. As mentioned, Boucher’s relationship with Musk and his systemic complicity in eco-disruption/collapse complicate her own premise here. However, it could be argued her complicity is merely an amplified version of our own ‘normal’ complicity in these systems, magnified by celebrity and tabloid-dramatics. If anything, an impossible measure of purity by which we hold visible persons to account is exactly that—a reserve for celebrity, an outward diversion which renders our own complicities in toxic systems momentarily moot. The pleasures of indignation from keyboard citadels will always win out over personal inventory. And they are pleasures impossible without the ur-judgements of Good and Evil—a binary that blinds to the in-between greys of non-innocence, which to my mind is truer of our compromised worlding.

ii) ART ANGELS (2015)

Art Angels, preceding Miss Anthropocene, did similar things in as much as the work gestured towards presiding deities in and around the creative act—which we can assume in the album’s various nods to Greco-Romantic-Renaissance styles, was meant in the manner of classical muses. If Miss Anthropocene sought to birth a new order of prevailing gods, Art Angels merely acts to provoke lesser demiurges not so much consumed with cosmogony as they are attuned to play. In typical Grimes fashion the album came about from her experiences with major pop production which in her mind is was and remains a male-dominated sector, and brushes with which tended to result in patronising encounters where producers assumed her label-independence (and womanhood) meant she was incapable of big-time mixing herself. Undeterred, Boucher declared she was more than capable of making a chart-ready pop album. Thusly Art Angels was born, an effort to wrangle the Grimes project into top-forty territory. It arguably fails in this endeavour—but as a Grimes album, it bears typically esoteric textures.

Instead of gods, with Art Angels Boucher (for the first time) donned a litany of personas which were so convoluted they required some unpacking for the less-than-casual consumer. Which was a feat in itself—offering on the one hand an album which works on a surface level, but which dually services an existing fandom for whom more esoteric readings are both irresistible and inevitable. This respect for her audience is one of Boucher’s points of difference as a ‘pop’ artist, and will continue to be so long as pop (which in it’s present form exists as ‘post’, despite the earnest resuscitations of hyper and glitch) cannibalises itself over and again—ironically, one of the signalling traits of the genre.

As mentioned guitar was not an instrument Boucher was privy to before this album, and certainly not an instrument compatible with the futurist whimsies of her work to date. That said, it was the perfect instrument by which to mould a self-consciously ‘pop’ album, seeing as the genre fixates on recycling the past and proffering reconfigurations of existing syntax. It is perhaps for this reason Boucher decided to couch an experiment with ‘conventional’ acoustic sound in a tableaux of characters and deities—some of which speak to the transpersonal-transhuman vectors of late-stage capital as famously delineated by the scholarship of Donna Haraway.

These characters run thusly—there’s a concretion of her Grimes persona (Rococo Basilisk) which she famously murders in the Flesh Without Blood video, signalling how the album is a pointed departure; there’s a time-travelling gender-fluid vampire called Kill V Maim (who she plays in the video to the titular song); there’s IV, demon overlord who also appears in the Flesh Without Blood video—a fallen blood-spattered angel with sinister white eyes; and finally there’s Screechy Bat, who Boucher in this motley crew says is the performer, the pop-singer avatar for the album’s amorphous mythos. Amorphous because each character is an iteration of the same body in time, who Boucher loosely gestures at having time-travelling abilities which throughout the album they’re using to find and kill Rococo Basilisk—presumably to correct some faux pas on their shared timeline (so yeah, convoluted).

SHAPESHIFTING IN THE 21ST CENTURY—CYBORGIAN IDENTITY, CITATIONAL THIEVERY, COSPLAY, & DEFIGURATIVE PAINTING

It’s in this playful amorphousness where Boucher’s identity as an artist can be found—ironically, in the fluidity of identity itself. In the vein of Judith Butler, where gender exists only in it’s expression (Gender Trouble, 1990), Grimes perfectly encapsulates everything we’ve come to appreciate about media convergence and the Self as a constantly evolving performance coterminous with media, rather than being somehow separate from and thusly interfaced with it. Via Donna Harroway we are all cyborgs, irrevocably enmeshed with the augmentations of language (of which media is property) and our performances therein (Cyborg Manifesto, 1985). The self, much like gender, only exists in these performances—paradoxically making the symptom of self it’s own reflexive cause.

This ties in heavily with Boucher’s frequent deployment of cosplaying as an aesthetic, which she does even outside of costuming as her invented characters. Cosplaying, behind which there’s scanty literature (though what’s out there is erudite enough), also extends the performative nature of identity under post-internet convergences, whereby consumers are turned into “critical readers and retellers” of popular narratives—be they manga science-fiction or fantasy derived (Paul Mountfort, Anne Pierson-Smith, Adam Geczy, Planet Cosplay; Costume Play, Identity, and Global Fandom, 2019). Grimes herself often dresses up as Babydoll from Zack Snyder’s Suckerpunch (2011), a movie as fraught with misguided female-empowerment messages as it is distillations of a then-burgeoning cosplay-as-subcultural-phenomenon. That she does so in the video for recent single Player of Games makes sense, seeing as that film is a pastiched configuring of the gamer-aesthetic du jour. Before even overtly playing with cosplay as futurist signalling though, Grimes’s crossover album Visions was critically tagged with the micro-genre ‘post-internet’, by which her genre-experiments were even then recognised as symptomatic of an internet-specific disaggregating of self—whereby pre-internet modalities of being in the world were becoming less tenable under the accelerant of globally tethered data-networks (and arguably, the smartphone).

In the French tradition of detournement, cosplaying—which Miss Boucher deploys liberally—also enjoys the same potentially subversive rerouting or hijacking of commercial aesthetics as those pioneer culture-jammers of the late sixties and early seventies. Artists and artist collectives like Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaists all contributed to this tradition of detournement in differing degree and style. As Mountfort Pierson-Smith and Geczy also point out, the act of cosplaying is citational, in as much as it establishes canon-specific referential branches of meaning (2019). That the bulwark of cosplaying’s citations are embodied doesn’t stop them from having the same intertextual (frequently hyper-textual) function as regular or literary citations, the major difference here being canonical; one in academic registers, the other retrieving from a popularly delineated canon of science fiction, fantasy, manga, and video-games.

On top of being citational, the detournement aspect of cosplaying is derived from the commandeering of commercial registers towards new branches of meaning, frequently diverging from cited text; often radically, and against the legal tenets of intellectual property. In this way, Boucher’s use of cosplay attempts to consolidate it’s manoeuvre of detournement towards a futurist aesthetic which holds a surprisingly legible program; that program being a reconfiguring of existing disparate elements—all the details of a compromised present, commercial or otherwise—towards a more integrated whole. Furthermore, the program begins with conscious re-fashioning of the self, deconstructing the self as consumer and reconstructing it as a subject couched in a contemporary mythic; this mythic being necessarily peopled with a pantheon of gods and characters which, though augmented with recognisable pop-cultural citations, are meant to elicit newness. In less words, it’s Boucher’s morning of the New Gods (to quote a track from Miss Anthropocene which acts as that album’s thesis).

What Boucher actions in her particular deployment of cosplay is also similar to the breaks from a ‘representative regime’ with painting in the nineteenth century. Rather than the transgressive borrowing of detournement, select nineteenth century painters sought to separate from the instrumentality of painting towards a more impressionistic approach, seeing as figurative painting at the time tended to serve specific ideological functions. Here public art was almost exclusively commissioned and displayed to stress the authorial position of monarchy and papacy. The gravitas of ‘modern art’ today, in abstraction or impression from anything we might concretely relate this type of painting to (re actual objects in the world), is a trace of this cleavage which produced then-radical departures, but which now arguably flounders in search of subject matter and form as unbounded aesthetics (Jacques Ranciere, The Future of the Image, 2007).

In fact, modern art is popularly disdained for it’s objective gratuity, it’s perceived elitism, and the wilful esoterica of it’s subject matter. More recently symptomising luxury consumption and affluent tax evasion, at one point this type of image production represented the medium’s divorcing from oppressive systems to realign it’s speculations with an “internal necessity”(Ranciere, 2007), rather than abiding by the legibility of the given (a ‘rational’ visual lexicon, an oppressively totalising ocular logic). In less words, modern art wilfully against simplistic representation is anti-hegemonic, and thusly—sans the stratified apparatus of high-end consumerism—subversion in it’s purest form (though this carries little weight in a time where subversion itself is a mostly harmless affective commodity).

In The Future of the Image (2007) Ranciere also calls this break defiguration, a dispelling of the representative habits of painting towards the aforementioned “internal necessity”, which to nineteenth century painters meant that unrepresented or perhaps technically unrepresentable private-resonance between viewer and world—the felt necessity towards expression, a subjective tension seeking reconciliation with an external medium. Furthermore, a subjective tension which has no issue thieving or crossing generic borders in it’s quest for intuitive delineation. In effect Boucher’s grabbing use of cosplay defigures the original texts from which these ‘types’ are borrowed, creating a hyper-space or hypertextual sublime by “virtue of it’s multiplicity and disorder”(Ranciere 2007). This is not unlike Edmund Burke’s summation of the sublime (to quote The Future of the Image one last time), specifically in responding to Milton’s portrait of Satan from Paradise Lost; that the sublime was here reached through assembling “images of a tower, an archangel, the sun rising through mists or in an eclipse, the ruin of monarchs and the revolution of kingdoms” (Ranciere, 2007). In the vein of Dadaist detournement, establishing a new aesthetic by displacing embedded symbolism (commercial narrative or other) from given rationales and letting each run amok and speak freely to each other in previously impossible ways.

POP-STARS—A MOST DANGEROUS GAME

It could be observed that most pop musicians display this type of synthetic-aesthetic holism—for example, previously mentioned contemporaries of Boucher have all dabbled in whimsical futurism, most notably Gaga’s recent Chromatica whose work therein, it could be argued, strives for the same sublime utopianising as Boucher’s. That said, the major differences here stem from two places. Firstly, Boucher’s work is consistent throughout, where other artists (again, repeat offender Gaga) will cycle through studio-prescribed aesthetic turns, putting on and taking off thematic hats in attempts to lure broader listenership (and the impossible task of maintaining relevance/chasing the zeitgeist etc).

Secondly, Boucher’s continuous adoption of cosplaying motifs—in that both Boucher and cosplayers cite the same canonical texts—exhibits a prolonged rumination on a single theme(/s), meaning between each album there’s no commercially schizophrenic cleavage (for example, Yeehaw Joanne Gaga versus Sci-fi Chromatica Gaga). Rather, we have an artist whose process is bared, whose digestion of popular culture is co-present with that of her audience—and in the relatable, visible, and subsequently legible permutation of Boucher’s aesthetic choices, there resides an almost literary continuity (though this artistic earnest, like anything disseminated en masse, is immediately affectively commodified).

Female pop-stardom is a categorical ‘type’ in and of itself, fetishised and vilified in equal measure. Philip K. Dick, whose fantasist musings are never far from the science fiction canon, repeatedly used female pop-star characters in his narrative worlds to bear messages from the divine, beggaring the kinds of “too-close reading” of popular media normally reserved for that fraught scholarly rubric of denotative versus connotative (Connie Ruberg, Video Games Have Always Been Queer, 2019). In Dick’s world the sacral is ever-present, and ‘profane’ text (like a pop song) is as appropriate a carrier of revelation as spontaneous cursive on a stone tablet or a burning bush in the desert.

In a roundabout way Dick’s almost exclusive use of female characters as divine instruments is not dissimilar from the way women or their images are consumed IRL, as corporeal nullities upon which every fleeting collective fantasy is projected and excited. For the female pop star, the body is a canvas upon which a gendered teleologic—an entrenched history of signs—is written, the female body as object and commodity, packaged to invite specific looking relations (usually heteronormative, almost always eroticised). It’s in conjunction with these habits and logics that a female pop star such as Boucher, or Gaga, is persuaded to explore incremental aesthetic ‘eras’ in which their work and presence is cohered episodically—as artists in their own right sure, but more often than not as vessels for commercially friendly ideology. This is perhaps how a pop star can be political, in as much as their work either stands in resistance to or compliance with the inherent instrumentality of the platform itself. Pop stardom as an elevated ‘magic circle’ with only a few functioning ladders thence, and within that circle a finite set of ludic boundaries—for the lucky few, a variously limiting game.

GAMES WITHIN GAMES WITHIN GAMES—A CONTINGENT STACK, A PERFORMATIVE WEIRDING

Thematically Player of Games, both song and video, points at the canons which cosplayers frequently cite in their reflexive donning, but within Boucher’s tableaux there’s more going on than capitalising on popular aesthetics. If the lure of cosplaying is to insinuate oneself into a broader narrative, thereby remaking the body as a fantastical object and effectively transcending (effacing?) real-world identity-tethers, then Boucher’s use of it here (specifically in Player of Games) is doing this and more—namely, making a fantastical allegory of the ‘games’ which constitute her lived experience, while dually giving those games critique. As Mountfort Pearson-Smith and Geczy point out, the first incentive is common amongst cosplayers, whereby personas are chosen for nostalgias and spiritual affinities, like with the nominal liturgical value of Catholic name-saints—though as they also point out, incentives have shifted concomitant with social media where documentation of cosplaying is trafficked as a cache of cultural capital less to do with the textually-collaborative spirit of cosplaying, and more to do with exposure and celebrity (Planet Cosplay; Costume Play, Identity, and Global Fandom, 2019).

The most obvious game Boucher’s critiquing, or at the very least drawing attention to, is the game of celebrity itself. Before her relationship and subsequent breakup with tech mogul Elon Musk Boucher’s following was already substantial. However, to an existing fan base the pairing seemed at odds with Boucher’s (presumed) liberal stance, garnering the artist criticism for a perceived tone-deafness—making Boucher fodder for continuing internet vitriol. By any measure the Player of Games video is an indulgent allegory for their now defunct relationship, in which Grimes and Musk are royalty in a castle playing various rivalrous games—fencing, saber-duelling, and something like Rowling’s wizard-chess.

In the tradition of masquerades and even drag cosplaying is cross-pollinated with the same symbolic exoticism, whereby an unreachable fundament of Otherness (gendered, Orientalised etc.) is intentionally commingled with (Catherine Bell, Ritual; Perspectives and Dimensions, 1997). Normally this functions to entertain potentially subversive concepts and gestures without threatening a society’s primary values, which in feudalist societies meant a ritual mixing of classes as a kind of safety valve for historically entrenched tensions (Bell, 1997). In Player of Games this precedent of class mixing is elided with hypocritical irony, as Boucher’s alluded-to realm of otherness is fantastically representative of wealth and celebrity—and Boucher and Musk’s fortress-like existence therein.

What then are we to make of this? That Boucher considers herself and ex Musk members to a feudalist elite of money and talent ala Ayn Rand? Or perhaps, seeing as she’s already painfully aware of these fan-readings of the pairing, the video is a knowing self-satire in which she’s giving trolling oxygen to her own rumoured hubris. Recent twitter-posts of Boucher reading Karl Marx in a Fremen water-recycling suit from popular science fiction series Dune suggests that Player of Games is the latter, in as much as that image was nuanced towards criticism she’s joined league with an insidious ruling class; while also (yet again) cosplaying.

There’s another tradition ala Julia Kristeva where cosplaying intersects with the solo female artist (and which is also repetitiously evident in the work of Grimes), and that’s elevating the body to a spectacle of grotesque or abjection (Powers of Horror, 1980) . Like with the ritual topsy-turvy of masquerade and carnival, cosplaying creates a fantastic or “abject body” whose mere presence elicits the upsetting and momentary inverting of existing norms (Kristeva, 1980). What Kristeva is getting at here is, much like in the ritual-function of carnival and masquerade, the fantastic or grotesque body is singularly representative of valuations that exist outside of mainstream discourse and are subsequently perceived as threatening—to the normative, singly symbolic of the breakdown of meaning itself. Despite the allowance of these bodies in liminal spaces designated entertainment for their triviality/frivolity (the ritual appearance of the Harlequinn, Lady Gaga again), the grotesque or abject body remains threatening if not properly mediated; cordoned off in the manner of a contagion. The abjection which this body signifies is inherently infectious, if improperly exposed to the masses a potential dissident force against which increasingly convoluted prophylactic measures must be deployed. This is conjecturally why genre is policed, to fortify against the drift of mainstream discourse and it’s political instrumentality when coexisting with a variety of abject bodies (lest one contaminate the other).

To speculate even more wildly, perhaps the genres of superstardom afforded certain solo female artists is itself a generic container for the systematised grotesque-ness of womanhood, period. Not that womanhood is fundamentally grotesque, but certainly it’s been historically configured as such—if only to justify the subjection of femininity and it’s bodies to a totalising patriarchal metric. In this vein, female celebrity can be seen as a kind of martyrdom, whereby the gendered assumptions of our society are projected onto these feminine bodies—bodies situationally functioning as blank canvases towards presenting instrumental configurations of gender in amplified ways. Which, if Britney Spears is a right and recent example of, is a script containing a certain disdainful brutality when it comes to the production and mass consumption of femininity.

IN CONCLUSION

What then are we to make of Grimes in this milieu? Certainly she’s suffered vitriol in the manner of Spears, though perhaps without the egregious loss of personhood which Britney Spears has been battling (and recently triumphed over) since 2007. That said the rage with which Boucher’s been targeted, all for her choice of romantic partner, is approximately drawn from the same well of gendered bias and resentment. However, her almost playful approach to internet hate and increased visibility via Musk seems to point towards an awareness of her tethered position to precedents of celebrity and gender, not as societal constructs/compulsions but as games in which she retains her autonomy.

Also, her artistic incorporation or echoing of her own shifting status in this rubric bolsters the view that Boucher is aware of herself as a body tethered to games, some of which she was born into (as a woman) and some of which she willingly opted into—neither of which, however, being isolated sequences of action and response, but games which are themselves tethered to other games. In fewer words, Player of Games is a commentary on the gamification of society broadly, and the place in which she finds herself—which is both isolated from her fan base by wealth and class, but also distantly tethered by the universal understanding and spectatorship of these games. If anything, it’s a framing of gamification as radical contingency.

Furthermore, Player of Games both lyrically and visually allegorises that other game which has universal breadth in our society—the game of heteronormative coupling. That these normative romantic tensions are all but satirised as mythic battles, less between mutually supportive-affectionate lovers and more between lethally driven competitors, seems to be a critique thereof rather than a starry-eyed affirmation. Even more so considering the music video culminates in Boucher’s death at the hands of her armoured suitor. As per Butler’s cited critique on the performative nature of gender, it is perhaps not surprising that the Grimes project—already proficient in performative identity-construction (and deconstruction)—would liken coupledom to a duel of isolated players whose lives literally depend on their scheduled performances therein. Scheduled because as with normative couplings certain consumerist age-specific landmarks solidify the performance (or win the game), such as reproducing and purchasing property. Bonnie Ruberg calls this scheduling “chrononormativity” (Video Games Have Always Been Queer, 2019), perhaps nodding to Saturn (identified with the Greek Cronus or Chronos) jealously devouring his own children.

There is perhaps another rounding-off coda within Art Angels which testifies to a reading of the game of pop-stardom in which Boucher finds herself. As explored that album gathers a selection of personas sharing a single body but separated in their supposed immortality by an enormous communal timeline. Filtered through the conventional episodic nature of artist ‘eras’, we can grasp this move as a critique on that consumerist logic in which the pop-artist must make coherent their creative licenses through stop-start aesthetic turns, all the while juggling a secondary continuity without which their commoditised signature dissipates. That Boucher’s characters here have the ability to weave in and out of each other’s temporal localities is perhaps the artist’s commentary on the arbitrariness of these turns or eras, and how episodic rhythms—when imposed—create abominations like Roccoco Basilisk. Which of course Boucher’s other Art Angels characters are collaborating to assassinate. Which begs the question; in the court of Boucher’s avatar-muses (or literally Art Angels), just what is the crime Basilisk has committed to warrant capital punishment?

The video for Flesh without Blood bears some insight. It’s here we’re introduced to Roccoco Basilisk, in a tangerine Antoinette-gown and purple wig. IV is also present, wielding a bloody knife that Basilisk later pulls out of herself, seeming to suggest the assassination has been successful and IV the triumphant perp. Of these personas Basilisk is the most overtly feminine, occupying a queenly position for best performing the expected gendered tenets—and it is perhaps in the limitations of gender itself the reason for Basilisk’s death lies. Not killed spitefully, but as a necessary escape from gendered strictures. In the pleasures of self destruction, a queering (Ruberg, 2019).