By Aaron Darc
Media
WHEN PRODUCTS GO BAD
Aug 26th
“Mathew Newton should know better,” said one angry forum fiend. But should we?
Well, here we go. Another month, another celebrity domestic violence scandal – albeit one with considerable déjà vu. I guess this means we’ll forget about Mel Gibson now, until the next time he flips his lid? Or will these two take turns? It’s this cycle that is the shocker in these situations – that we have, after all, seen it all before. Mathew Newton is a damaged man with a violent streak – well, what a surprise! And don’t get me wrong, it’s worth our repulsion to domestic violence against women to be a part of this, absolutely. But let’s stop for a moment, and also take a look at the other aspects such situations allow us to see, in some rather startling shades of very dark truths. There is more to this than meets the single-track minds of the consumer public, or their obliviousness to network TV factories. There is much more damage to be seen, here, than just that of a troubled boy who has been poisoned, like so many before him, by the silver coating on the spoon of his nurture.
JENNIFER HAWKINS STARTS PR DAMAGE CONTROL… BUYS KITTEN…
Jan 9th
The Jennifer Hawkins charity stunt fallout continues. Time for some damage control! Let’s take a look at how stunts turn into desperate media strategies of salvation…
Oh, Jennifer. You’re in a little over your head, aren’t you, darling? It all seemed like a good idea at the time – far from being a PR disaster, it must have had the markings of a fool-proof PR coup. Of course, it’s really the job of your agent, Sean Anderson, who made this deal, to see a little further down the track; but the celebrity industry of the big smoke isn’t known for being comprised of those who understand social backlashes of this nature. But what a backlash it’s been. Even when I was writing my original article, only minutes after the first stories started to appear, I had no idea that Jackie Frank’s ridiculous stunt would become national “news”. I even slated it in the “social” category, because I felt labeling it thus would be a little over the top. But now, this is well and truly “news”. Which, when it’s all said and done, is a good thing. Frank claimed to have wanted to start a discussion. She got one. And it’s left the former Miss Universe in a precarious position. “I didn’t do this for PR,” she told Herald Sun, “…just to help a cause.” Needless to say, that’s rubbish – Hawkins is savvy enough, by now, to know what was behind the dealings of her agent and Marie Claire. There was a cause, alright – but it had nothing to do with eating disorders. And the irony? This is all now coming out from fresh publicity manoeuvrings of the most desperate kind – the quick leap to save poor Jen from a potential image spiral. Karma’s a bitch. She probably had better things to do, this week, than be shoved out in front of any reporter who would give her the press coverage to salvage the wreckage. But, hey, at least she managed to squeeze in time to buy a kitten for her parents. More >
JENNIFER HAWKINS SAVES WOMEN OF AUSTRALIA
Jan 4th
Marie Claire editor, Jackie Frank (of Australia’s Top Supermodel “fame”), enlists the help of our most beloved beauty, Jeniffer Hawkins, for a naked shoot that hides PR in the cloak of charity…
If there was ever an example of just how poisoned and delusional the harmful world of women’s lifestyle media is, surely this is it. Last month, Marie Claire, which has always had a knack of dressing up trash as credible infotainment, surveyed their readers and found that only a dismal 12 percent were “happy with their bodies”. Of course, the irony of the women’s lifestyle industry is that this is, far from an alarming figure, a comforting picture of the very anxiety that fuels sales. If women weren’t happy with their bodies, sex lives and wardrobes, they… well…. wouldn’t need to fork out money for cokehead hacks from Potts Point to tell them what they should be looking like. But Marie Claire cares – it wants Australian women to know that even though it’s 200 plus pages of dribble are almost entirely devoted to aspirational material, whereby the ideal is offered as a solution to its readers’ anxieties and doldrums – completely reaffirming every facet of the modern body-image crisis – we’ve really all missed the point, and it is simply trying to do its bit to help its female readers feel better about themselves. Today, it stated its case via a publicity stunt that is neither fresh nor meaningful, but rich in hypocrisy and calculation. It has begun a tiresome “debate” that will all end exactly where they want us to be – finding the image in question in our supermarkets and newsagencies, and putting our money in its pockets. Let’s consider the many good reasons not to. More >
LEST WE FORGET: MICHAEL JACKSON
Jun 27th
“Jackson had amazing dancing legs. Watching him perform Thriller is amazing – He stays with the beat and never misses a quaver. Michael was pure genius, and his death is nothing short of a tragedy and a shocking waste of his wonderful talent.”
Bruce Forsyth
Uh-oh, he’s about to speak about a dead celebrity. Michael Jackson fans, run, run away! Now! But the thing is – hear me out, here – my fascination and condemnation of the frenzy that follows the death of a celebrity has nothing to do with the actual celebrity. Everybody carries on in this bizarre state of delusion – one that pretends to be about the dead celebrity in question, but is nothing of the kind. And it is no more illustrated as such, as when someone dies who has had, let’s just be real here, as questionable a life as Jackson’s. I pointed it out with Irwin’s death, because he was simply unremarkable and largely unimportant until his death. Ledger’s neared closer, as we all chose to romanticise a damaged Hollywood heart-thob who partied just a little too hard. But now, we have the death of Michel Jackson. It seems bizarre to write it. But he’s dead. And when he was alive – for the longest while now, at very least – he wasn’t the kind of man we rejoiced the merits of. He was one of the most hated celebrities of the last decade – and, beyond that, for the last few years we had basically forgotten him (although it would seem he did not forget us). Every now and then, he would pop up (on places like Australian Idol – of all things!) to be indulged as nothing more than a fleeting symbol of yesteryear – we would consume him with a fondness every bit as self-indulgent and meaningless as symbols of yesteryears are for us. But now, he’s dead. And open up any paper, and you’d think it was one of the most shocking turning points of modern civilisation itself. I mean, really. Michael Jackson, the tortured, fucked up monster that we made – the guy who had all but mutilated his body in a manner that wasn’t anywhere near as amusing as we so viciously exploited him for – died. Go figure. If anything, that he made 50 astonishes me.
THE WAR ON CHASER
Jun 6th
While I’m aware this website pools a similar demographic to The Chaser (so I’m not expecting this to go down too well), I’ve never really been a fan. Yes, the team come up with the odd mildly amusing piece; but they sit amongst a lot of crass skit-comedy that, to my mind, is no better than any of the other compilation shows aired on commercial networks. In fact, some of their rivals are much better; but they fail to create the cultural context that deems their work so supposedly intelligent and socially cutting, as The Chaser has so successfully cultivated. And I’ve always had a problem with the legitimacy of their staple “pranks”, because so many of them are fake. I personally know one of the “actors” hired for one of the stunts that was, like all of them, aired as a supposedly riotous scene that not only were we expected to believe was “real”, but one that’s entire comedy revolved around that realness (the Borat style of watching real people respond to absurd situations). In this particular skit, an unsuspecting Japanese businessman shares a cab with two of the boys; but, truth be told, there was nothing unsuspecting about him – he had a friend who was part of the production team, who called on him after the casting department had difficulty finding the right unsuspecting Japanese businessman for the role. He knew nothing of the television show, and – unbelievably – did it for free, as a “favour”. Needless to say, he never heard from them, again; but the sketch became one of their most notorious – a sketch that was (particularly considering that it was completely scripted) unnecessarily racist. But that’s The Chaser for you – peel away the feeling we have that, as lefties, we’re supposed to see it all as some searing social portrait or, worse, an important warrior in an ideological crusade (I mean, really), 80 percent of their work is filled with nothing more than dressed up toilet humour. They forever crucify the Bogans, but they have more in common with them than they presume. They just wear nicer clothes, and hang out in cultured areas of the inner city. Oh, and they’ve made a lot more money. But this week, a week into their latest series, the similarities have been highlighted.THE SKINNY WHITE GIRL SAID TO THE SKINNY WHITE GUY WITH THE CAMERA…
May 27th
ACA Journalist: “So would this be a normal thing for you to do?”
Chk Chk Boom Girl™: “It would be. If there was a camera on the street, every week, it would be!”
Laughter can be cruel. We all know that – I’m sure every single one of us, at some point in our life (for some, many points) have been laughed at. To remember it, is to remember the emotional wound – whether brief, or that lingering, subconscious kind. And it really does come down to that cliché conceptual division, between laughing “at” someone and laughing “with” them. Truth be told, we don’t laugh with each other nearly enough; but it’s lovely when it happens – a true empathetic kind of joy, and decidedly healthy. Very different, of course, to laughing at someone. That is sadism. We find it first in young teens, who, in their evolving socialisation, take a brutal, blatant pleasure in the misfortune and chastising of others. Some would say it’s a kind of developmental phenomenon, a by-product of the mechanism of empathy being something we are not born with but grow into – as if sadism should become slowly eradicated, as we learn it is “wrong” on the basis of understanding how it makes its victims feel. Or, perhaps, it is a reactionary phenomenon, a kind of cornered or threatened mechanism, a way to attack those who we feel attack us in some way. At times, it’s probably either or both these dynamics. But human beings are, there’s no doubt about it, seemingly challenged when it comes to empathy for others, as well as rather territorial. And “comedy” – the process of eliciting laughter – has long been a favourite weapon for threatened societies who are unable to transcend the divides of that perception of threat. In the war years of my Great Grandmother, beautiful everyday Aussies sang the most horrendous comedy songs about the Asians they fought against in the war (cultural or otherwise). “I like Chinese” – bizarrely destined to be rewritten as the commercial theme for an electronics retail giant owned by Chinese Australians (“I like Bing Lee”) – was a crass tune punning the advent of the Chinese restaurants (how bizarre to think that these symbolised the perceived invasion) with literally eating Chinese people. Racism meets cannibalism – charming. And this week, all these progressive years later, we had the Chk Chk Boom Girl™. Wogs of the world, beware; we’re not that much further than 1955 as you would think.
BAD PUBLICITY FOR KILLEEN IS GOOD PUBLICITY FOR FADING LOGIES
May 6th
Like most of the country, I didn’t bother watching The 2009 Logies. In fact, I had no idea it was on. But boy, do I know about it, now! This week has seen a constant dialogue of Logies talk, filling papers, gossip mags, TV talkshows and radio talkbacks – it’s literally millions of dollars worth of press and media space. Ironic, considering that the clear, self-confessed problem of The Logies was that (like me, seven days ago) nobody particularly gave a shit, anymore. Problem solved, I guess. And how did the struggling event find its relevance? With a Shock And Awe campiagn against last Sunday’s host, Gretel Killeen. Feel sorry for Killeen, if you must – but don’t, for even a second, feel sorry for The Logies. They’re more than happy to let their freshly-cropped host get… well…. a good cropping. They’re thrilled to be the subject of a conversation, and they’re cleverly playing her death to achieve a resurrcetion from their own.
CATHERINE LUMBY TO THE RESCUE. OF THE NRL.
Mar 10th
In the wake of the latest NRL sexual assault scandal, Catherine Lumby rears her head with yet another soapbox rant that betrays and exploits the very social issue she pretends to support (the actual website it has been published on is currently down while uploading this, so CLICK HERE to go a forum wher
e someone has copied it), now being used as a basis for discussion of the horrifying allegations against star player, Brett Stewart. Which, as a carefully penned PR exercise, is precisely the point of it. Academia for sale?
Another week, another high profile, overpaid, male superstar allegedly abusing another woman. This site’s beginning to look like it’s devoted to nothing else; but if only this cultural disease would go away, I could get back to laughing at bad television. But, it’s not going anywhere. Far from the idealistic, convenient notions many harbor about our “progressive” society – where women being an oppressed gender and subject to a range of ill behaviours manifested and accepted within the misogyny and disrespect of men, is a thing of that past we (oh, good) don’t have to deal with (because that’s just so much easier) – here we are. Again. And this one involves… oh, my… a footballer?! Who would have thought?! But, lucky for us, Catherine Lumby, God’s gift to academia-slash-media-slash-humanity, has come forth with her corporate funded pearls of wisdom, to remind us that the issue of sexual abuse of women is by no means confined merely to football. Thanks, Catherine, ’cause, you know, it never dawned on me that it happened, any place else. For a minute there, I almost made a valid observation that threatened the publicity of the people who pay you.