Drew Cohen

Due 5/16/17

English 117 – Christian Thorne

White as a Flipping Gh-gh-gh-gh-gh-gHOST!!!!!

Perhaps you’ve heard about this before, but apparently you can be taught to fear people of mixed race.  Now, obviously you’re not going to call the police and run screaming if your half-Asian best friend turns the corner too quickly, but on a more subtle level, you can be tricked into thinking that mixed race people are untrustworthy and that they maybe even “give you the creeps.”  You may believe that you’re above such prejudice, but keep reading, and I can prove that racial purism can be made subconsciously appealing to you.

Race, as you might imagine, is not only determined by skin tone: throughout history, racial scripts and the societal roles of people of different races have defined race as just as much a cultural phenomenon as a pigmentary one.  As such, being mixed race might allow you to not only experience multiple racial cultures in daily life, but to also have the freedom to choose which race you align with more.  Studies like one by Miri Song of The Sociological Review have shown that people of mixed race tend to “choose one race as their primary basis of identification” (Song, 2010).  But at the same time, society tends to enforce a “one drop rule,” especially on African Americans, such that even “part-Black people are expected to see themselves as black” (Song, 2010).  In cases of misalignment between socially-expected and self-conceptualized racial identity, choosing to identify with a race that is unexpected of you can be seen as something like wearing a mask: the you that the world sees is not the real you.  

In this case, if you want to consider how masking true identity can play into anti-mixed-race stigma, simply look at a classic series that bases much of its own cultural identity on “unmasking” monsters: the Scooby-Doo franchise.  

Scooby-Doo is a kid-friendly mystery series all about uncovering the “masked madmen around the world” as the lovable Great Dane, Scooby-Doo, and his four teenaged friends in Mystery Inc., Norville “Shaggy” Rogers, Daphne Blake, Fred Jones, and Velma Dinkley, travel in their flower-power “Mystery Machine” van to solve the world’s spooky puzzles (Elzinga and Wolfswinkel, 2011).  And if you don’t already know who Scooby-Doo is, that’s “like, totally uncool, man.”  

Quite seriously, a study by neuroscientists at CU-Boulder found most college students to have adept semantic memory of the Scooby-Doo theme song, finding that these students could remember and fill in a missing word at any point in the song (Overstreet et al., 2015).  Scooby-Doo is a genuine household name in any of its many iterations, from the original Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? cartoons to the reboot series What’s New, Scooby-Doo? and beyond.  

Notorious among this notoriety is the 2002 live-action movie, Scooby-Doo.  Andrew O’Hehir of Salon.com notes that the movie is “lowbrow” and “tries to walk that same well-worn line of simultaneously spoofing a classic TV series and remaining true to its spirit” by reuniting a disbanded Mystery Inc. and crudely making fun of the clichés of the original series and its characters (O’Hehir, 2002).  

And with language that includes the words “bi-otch,” and lines like “I would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for you meddling sons of-” and “you don’t have the scrote for this job,” you can clearly see that this is a movie for nostalgic teens and adults that, alongside wanting to see Daphne with actual, human breasts and Freddie Prinze Jr. with bleached hair, feel the urge to relive their nostalgia of the classic Scooby-Doo experience outside of the second dimension.

Yet more significant than this slightly more adult interpretation of the series is the way that the movie honors the clichés of the original cartoons by flipping them on their heads, the classic “unmasking” a notable example.  Freddie Prinze Jr.’s Fred insists at one point in the movie that Mystery Inc.’s “area of expertise is nut jobs in Halloween masks,” and claims that ghosts and monsters aren’t real.  Or, at least he does until they are real.  

Rather than playing up the man in the mask like the cartoons do, the movie utilizes man as the mask: the movie’s monsters can’t survive in sunlight and need to use the human body, as Velma says, “like a human suit, SPF 1,000,000,” after removing the human’s spirit from his or her body.  Along the same lines, the true villain of the movie is the obnoxious Scrappy-Doo, a pint-sized pup with a glandular problem who disguises himself in, you guessed it, a human suit: the “Mr. Mondavarious” that invites Mystery Inc. to his amusement park is really Scrappy-Doo in costume.

Does this immediately instill fears of multiracial people in you?  To understand why it might, you need to first understand Richard Dyer’s arguments on the embodiment of whiteness.  Dyer argues that “to represent people is to represent bodies,” but for white people “whiteness involv[es] something that is in but not of the body” as “white people have a peculiar relationship to race, of not being quite contained by their racial categorization” (Dyer 14,18).  In this way, white people can “transcend” their bodies, since their racial identity does not limit them to judgment based on their physical appearance (Dyer 17).  The white identity is thus unique because it is more spiritual than physical – Dyer even mentions Christianity as an embodiment of whiteness.  It makes sense then that essentially all of the possession victims in the movie are white, including Fred, Velma, and Shaggy’s new love interest, Mary Jane.  In order to be possessed in this movie, you need to be able to allow your spiritual identity to transcend and be separated from your physical one and have your spirit removed from your body.  

This might also explain why a certain black side character, the Voodoo Maestro (yes, that is the only name they give him), can resist possession.  Of course, you can see in the movie that part of the Voodoo Man’s protection comes from his voodoo rituals, but the underlying ideology is crucial here: the one visible, semi-important black character in the movie has protection from possession.  The movie hungrily consumes Dyer’s argument like Shaggy and Scooby eat Scooby Snacks.

To this effect, the possessed humans in the movie are reminiscent of classic movie zombies.  

In one of the movie’s action scenes, a possessed Fred and his legion of white bodies chase Shaggy and Scooby into a shed, the monsters attempting to break in by reaching in through holes in the wall.  Sound familiar?  You might recognize this from every zombie movie ever.  

Physically reaching in or out is a classic feature of zombies from Night of the Living Dead to The Walking Dead, and the “trapped inside with zombies outside” scene like the one in this movie is an unmistakable cliché.  Justin Ponder of The Journal of Popular Culture notes that “the first reason that zombies horrify is that they are impure” and that they “defy boundaries considered not only social but also natural, the separation between live and dead enforced not by social institutions, but by the very laws of nature” (Ponder, 2012).  You can see similar impurity in the movie’s “zombies” in their language.  In an attempt to effectively emulate the speech of “today’s young people,” the monsters are taught “faux hip-hop lingo” (O’Hehir, 2002).  One of the movie’s more comedic moments happens when a possessed white girl named Carol throws her friend and yells “back off my grill, son!”  The possessed are notable for sounding different than you would expect them to by their looks: they look white and speak with stereotypically black, “hip-hop” language.  Compare this to the Voodoo Maestro’s stereotypical language (“why you all up in the voodoo ritual space?”), which isn’t seen as abnormal.  Similar to zombies, “mulattos” or, half-black, half-white people, once “horrified” people because they were “racially impure” (Ponder, 2012).  While zombies were impure for being both living and dead, mixed-race people “def[ied] the racial dichotomy upon which life in North America stood” and were long considered impure themselves (Ponder, 2012).  Remember how the possessed are essentially white masks for monsters?  The movie’s ideology demonizes people trying to “pass” as white.

But the unmasking cliché isn’t the only one flipped in this movie.  Alongside its prejudicial racial scripts, Scooby-Doo fortifies its female protagonists with narratives of female growth and empowerment.  Velma is empowered by being given the attention, publicity, and respect she deserves for her “brainwork” on Mystery Inc.’s cases.  At the same time, “damsel-in-distress” Daphne becomes a black belt and plays a huge part in saving the day rather than just “getting captured again.”  

Victoria Anne Newsom of Femspec gives us a definition for girl power, “the ability for young women to achieve personal empowerment while maintaining a distinctly ‘girlish’ style” (Newsom, 2004).  By this definition, Scooby-Doo is abound with “girl power,” but to a somewhat harmful extent.  Velma laments always being “picked last” and that guys like Fred “only care about supermodels” (which leads to one of Fred’s most classic lines: “I’m a man of substance.  Dorky chicks like you turn me on, too”).  What’s a good sign of Velma’s eventual empowerment?  Perhaps her possession by the monsters (an essential loss of agency) and a resulting “hot girl” makeover, including a new hairstyle and more revealing clothes than her classic “look at me, I’m Sandra Dee” turtleneck.  

And Daphne’s fighting ability makes her story similar to an “inversion cartoon,” which, as Joyce Hammond of The Journal of Popular Culture describes, “depicted women and men in a manner which inverted societal expectations” (Hammond, 1991).  These inversion cartoons were often “created by men for men” and used in Playboy magazines, while also aiming “primarily at white audiences” with white people “overwhelmingly depicted as characters” (Hammond, 1991).  So when Daphne helps save the day by fighting and defeating the stereotypically hispanic luchador Zarkos, the “famous masked wrestler” whom “you may recognize from Telemundo,” she actually applies yet another racial script to this movie – white women can be “empowered” through their girliness, essentially at the expense of marginalized races, and often to tailor to male gaze.

When you get down to the details, the girl power in this movie is hardly honorable.  But the key here is, as Andrew O’Hehir puts it, “mid-’90s nostalgia” (O’Hehir, 2002).  Look at the girl power in TV shows from the 1990s like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sailor Moon and you’ll see this female empowerment through “hyperfemininity and youth” (Newsom, 2004).  But the Scooby-Doo movie rips this off completely, actually casting Sarah Michelle Gellar, a.k.a “Buffy,” as Daphne to make her seem more capable and badass.  

Scooby-Doo masks its harmful racial narratives by playing up nostalgic girl power, which we don’t recognize as problematic because calling out women’s empowerment as problematic is inherently sexist.  What you get in the end then is a masking of the bad with the bad, and it works because, as Joyce Hammond mentions about inversion cartoons, “the audience identification with the cartoon characters was a significant aspect” and the cartoons “carried messages for the predominantly white male or white female audience” (Hammond, 1991).  When white audiences see the white female protagonists they grew up with achieve personal victories, they don’t notice that they’re being conditioned to fear the “mulatto” monsters of everyday life.  Jinkies!  Find me a better unmasking than that and I might just let you have a Scooby Snack.

 

This essay was read by Chloe Henderson and modeled after the style of David Foster Wallace.

Works Cited

Dyer, R. (1997).  The matter of whiteness.  In R. Dyer.  White.  London: Routledge, 1997.

Elzinga, Luke and Wolfswinkel, Kelsey (2011) “Scooby-Doo 101,” Ethos: Vol. 2011, Article 11. Available at: http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/ethos/vol2011/iss3/11

Hammond, J.D. (1991), Gender Inversion Cartoons and Feminism. The Journal of Popular Culture, 24: 145-160.

Newsom, V.A. (2004), Young Females as Super Heroes: Super Heroines in the Animated Sailor Moon. Femspec, 218: 57-81.

Ponder, Justin (2012), Dawn of the Different: The Mulatto Zombie in Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead. The Journal of Popular Culture, 45: 551-571.

O’Hehir, Andrew.  “Scooby-Doo” Salon.com.  14 June 2002. http://www.salon.com/2002/06/14/scooby_doo/.  Accessed 12 May 2017.

Overstreet, M.F., Healy, A.F. and Neath, Ian (2015), Further differentiating item and order information in semantic memory: students’ recall of words from the “CU Fight Song”, Harry Potter book titles, and Scooby Doo theme song.  Memory, 25: 69-83.

Song, Miri (2010), Does ‘race’ matter? A study of ‘mixed race’ siblings’ identifications. The Sociological Review, 10: 265-285.

Drew Cohen

4/19/17

English 117 Thorne

Grunge-bob Needs Spare Pants

Might our drive for a better life beyond our reach actually ruin our chances of ever having one?  Now, I don’t mean “better life” in terms of fast cars, solid gold faucets, or cashmere cardigan sleeves tied in knots around our necks as we tour the green.  No, I mean the “greeting every day with a smile on our face” and “happiness without the tender consolation of our bed-pillow” kind of better life.  Stick with me and I’ll show that killing the “grass is greener” pipe dream can make a “job” seem more fulfilling than a “career.”  I can prove that if we’re made comfortable with the idea that settling for less is a legitimately satisfying option, we can be fooled into believing that we would all live happier, more meaningful lives in mediocre dead-end jobs.

This notion seems impossible to the rational, college-educated sector of civilization, especially to a certain well-intentioned, grouchy German named Theodor Adorno, who, with the help of Max Horkheimer, wrote about stagnancy and uniformity in the 1940s after escaping to America from the twisted Third Reich.  

Adorno criticized the “unending sameness” of industrialized American popular culture and the notion that “nothing is allowed to stay as it was” with technology and innovation, and that this promised that “nothing will change” and “nothing unsuitable will emerge” (Adorno 106).  America’s counterintuitive use of new technology to both keep society from advancing and decrease individual quality of goods justifies Adorno’s frustration: what’s the point of technology if not to improve our daily lives?  To Adorno, our new ability as an industrialized nation to mass-produce anything we see fit is poison to our take on the quality of our lives, and emphasizing minute differences among cultural products of industrialization that are, on the most basic levels, the same, ruins our ability to see what’s really good for us and what’s phony crap.  Is he right about this?

Well, consider the cartoon Spongebob Squarepants.  

Our bubbly and optimistic titular sea-sponge’s life is filled with excitement and eye-popping color by his friends, neighbors, and undersea environment in his hometown of Bikini Bottom (note the colorful flower outlines in the “sky” that function as clouds).  The hugely popular cartoon’s creator, Stephen Hillenburg, was noted by Jonah Lee Rice to have said that the show’s characters are “intentionally bizarre and have strange shapes and that they all share the same strangeness” to the explicit purpose that Spongebob “emphasizes sameness among creatures that seem different” (Rice, 2009).  This seems like the classic “unity from diversity” ideology that drives modern liberal mentality, something positive, rather than harmful ideology, derived from a focus on “sameness.”  Viewers see examples of all types of sea life (fish, crustaceans, cephalopods, squirrels in diving suits, even people!) coexisting in an intact, inclusive community without the fish equivalent of racism.  Along these lines, Sean McElwee of Salon.com calls Bikini Bottom a “liberal utopia,” an idealized place not only for the intended child viewers but also for the parents and adults that watch alongside them (McElwee, 2013).  Sandy Cheeks (above mentioned squirrel in diving suit) is a key example of this, portraying a woman who devotes her life to scientific research rather than, as McElwee mentions, “staying at home and cooking for the kids” (McElwee, 2013).  

But like most cartoons, Spongebob incorporates frequent examples of violence ranging from Spongebob and Sandy’s playful love for karate to large-scale destruction of property and massive car wrecks, leading to the inevitable wail of sirens from police cars and/or ambulances.  Countless inconclusive studies have been carried out testing children’s tendencies to mimic the violent behavior seen in cartoons like Spongebob, often with results that contradict other studies’ findings (Kirsh, 2005).  Adorno expresses his own distaste for violence, not in terms of the impact on physical behavior it has, but rather of the humorous response it often receives, calling it cruel that laughter mostly prevails in modern pop culture “when there is nothing to laugh about” (Adorno 112).  Adorno goes so far as to say that in our “wrong society,” laughter is a “sickness infecting happiness and drawing it into society’s worthless totality,” acting as a consolation for a life poorly lived (Adorno 112).  I disagree with this sentiment, and I’ll explain my disagreement by considering Spongebob Squarepants as an example:

 

Adorno claims that “laughter about something is laughter at it” in any context (Adorno 112).  There are examples of this anywhere you look, even in Spongebob: characters like the grouchy Squidward Tentacles practically subsist by means of derisive laughter, mostly at Spongebob’s misfortune or misery.  Even some of the more lax characters like Spongebob’s friend Patrick Star laugh at violence on occasion, one case being when Patrick laughs at a character on TV getting hit in the head with a coconut.  Adorno would argue that this laughter “replaces pain … with jovial denial” (Adorno 112).  Derisive laughter is a primary indicator of the exhaustion, dissatisfaction, and lack of fulfillment Adorno blames industrialized culture for.  Squidward, who hates his job at the Krusty Krab, feels the weight of the limitations of his life regularly and is seemingly jealous of Spongebob for his happiness and optimism.  Patrick’s example is more contextual, as his laughter at violence is present after he returns home from a long day at “work” (actually just watching TV) in the episode “Rock-a-Bye Bivalve.”  As Adorno would argue, these characters indulge in this derisive laughter to cope with daily struggle.   

But this type of laughter is rare and dwarfed significantly by the amount of laughter on the show not necessarily directed at anything or anyone, but rather erupting from the joy of the moment.  The two primary sources of laughter on the show are Spongebob and Patrick: pretty much any time Spongebob isn’t working at the Krusty Krab, he and Patrick are playing games together or catching jellyfish in Jellyfish Fields.  Neither one of them laughs at the other: both laugh simply because of their shared joy.  Studies have shown that associating laughter with interpersonal communication, whether face to face or by device, indicates a higher average level of happiness from both people interacting (Vlahovic et al., 2012).  Spongebob and Patrick’s laughter makes their genuine happiness together clear, and in these cases this laughter is much more similar to carnivalesque laughter, common when considering movies like Jackass.  When carrying out crazy, “ball-busting” antics, such as when Ryan Dunn gets beat up by female world boxing champion Naoko Kumagai, the men of Jackass don’t laugh at Dunn, but rather at the absurdity and joy of the situation.  Much like these Jackass stars (and young children, the two groups likely on the same intellectual plane), Spongebob and Patrick laugh together simply because they’re happy and having “fun,” which Adorno claims, mistakenly in this case, “makes laughter the instrument for cheating happiness” (Adorno 112).  

But when this laughter is taken away, both Spongebob and Patrick lose that happiness they share.  In the episode “Patrick Smartpants,” a freak accident makes Patrick a genius and he hates his life because he doesn’t find his usual activities fun.  Losing his ability to have fun and laugh with his best friend makes Patrick’s once fulfilling life miserable.  

Adorno would say to this that if losing your ability to laugh makes you unhappy with your life, your life was never fulfilling in the first place.  I see this hearty crock of bullshit and raise one Spongebob Squarepants to meet his claim.  

Spongebob, aside from being kind, optimistic, and dedicated to his work, is notably unambitious, simply due to having a job he enjoys.  Once he gets his position at the Krusty Krab, Spongebob makes no attempts to work anywhere else or move past his beloved greasy spoon.  Spongebob’s boss, Mr. Krabs, is cheaper than cheap so Spongebob earns minimal salary, but he never once complains about this and is even fine with regularly having his pay docked to solve the “issue of the day” or avoid getting fired.  Squidward often notes on the show that Spongebob has an “abnormal” relationship to his work, and Sean McElwee goes so far as to label Spongebob a “marxist” because of his love for his labor (McElwee, 2013).  But Spongebob’s daily satisfaction is far from Adorno’s “austere” description of joy (Adorno 112).  Spongebob is known worldwide for his nasal, dolphin-like laughter which frequently makes itself known, especially while he’s working. Spongebob finds fulfillment in making Krabby Patties, his happiness marked by his signature laugh.  Interestingly enough, the only time Spongebob ever gets as thoroughly depressed as the times when he (briefly) loses his job is in the episode “Funny Pants,” in which Squidward tricks him into thinking that he’s broken his “laugh box” and can never laugh again.  When Spongebob wakes up the next morning and actually can’t laugh, he shuts himself in his house and cries uncontrollably until the morning after that when Squidward tells him that he was just joking.  

Spongebob’s laughter is the purest manifestation of his happiness: losing it doesn’t simply expose pre-existing dissatisfaction as Adorno claims, but rather removes Spongebob’s already present satisfaction with his life, which makes laughter the absolute antithesis of Adorno’s claim for him.  Adorno is wrong here, simply because he fails to understand that not all laughter is derisive or malicious – in cases like this, laughter is an expression of satisfaction.

So how can we be tricked into settling for less? Well, children watch Spongebob all around the world and are influenced by this cartoon role model who laughs and plays with his friends just like they do.  Children pay more attention to products in stores that have characters like Spongebob on them, and one study shows that boys aged 6 to 7 tended to choose food items in grocery stores advertised with pictures of Spongebob, even if they’re healthier and less appealing than unhealthy foods (Ogle et al., 2016).  We see Spongebob’s happiness and optimism and want to have the life he has, forgetting that he lives in a literal utopia (and a literal pineapple) and that his life is completely unrealistic – not only because he’s a talking sponge, but also because he can casually be docked a year’s pay and be fine with it.  I mean, we could try to live in a pineapple too – it’s all we could afford on Spongebob’s salary.  Adorno’s incorrect claims about laughter actually make his complete argument worth deeper consideration.  Spongebob, meanwhile, proves that laughter itself can be used to fool us into thinking that settling for subpar pay and treatment is a good option, maybe even the best option for us.  We’re trained to accept unjust labor expectations as long as we love what we do.  We see not even just Spongebob but Squidward also unwilling to actually leave the Krusty Krab for something better.  Meanwhile, Patrick is perfectly content with being unemployed.  Watch any episode of Spongebob Squarepants and tell me whether or not you feel some urge to abandon your current dreams and become a fry-cook as well.  Then, if you will, look up “gelotophobia” and see if you can still look at Spongebob the same way you might have as a child.  In short, Spongebob recreates the world as a child might imagine it: void of financial issues, higher education, and regulation of fair employment standards, but still satisfying and, you know, full of laughter.

 

This essay was read by Chloe Henderson.

 

References

Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M. (1944). The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.  In T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer.  Dialectics of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming.  New York: Herder and Herder, 1972.

Kirsh, S.J. (2005), Cartoon Violence and Aggression in Youth. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 11: 547-557.

McElwee, Sean.  “Spongebob Squarepants is a Marxist!” Salon.com. 14 November 2013. http://www.salon.com/2013/11/14/spongebob_squarepants_is_a_marxist/.  Accessed 15 April 2017.

Ogle, A.D., Graham, D.J., Lucas-Thompson, R.G. and Roberto, C.A. (2016), Influence of Cartoon Media Characters on Children’s Attention to and Preference for Food and Beverage Products. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 117: 265-270.

Rice, J. L. (2009), SpongeBob SquarePants: Pop Culture Tsunami or More?. The Journal of Popular Culture, 42: 1092–1114.

Vlahovic, T. A., Roberts, S. and Dunbar, R. (2012), Effects of Duration and Laughter on Subjective Happiness Within Different Modes of Communication. J Comput-Mediat Comm, 17: 436–450.