If you wait until the 1:00 mark, you’ll get a glimpse of fourteen year old Hilary, at a large outdoor music festival (I’m thinking it may have been Warped Tour, or perhaps some other sundry large, mid-to-late 90s punk/indie event. There were quite a few in the world of my adolescence). It re-appears a few times over the course of this video.
I received a link to this from an old and infinitely beloved friend, former housemate and general partner-in-trouble, who was trolling for Peter Broderick tracks (he’s worth giving a listen, if you haven’t – Portland-based, played on Efterklang’s Parades, which is a too-glorious album as far as glorious albums go) and found this footage. He shot it off to me, figuring it was a doppelganger. I watched it once. Rewatched it. Realized it was, indeed, myself; that I remembered a handful of those boy-faces surrounding me in that particular circle pit; that I could even assign a name to some of them, that I perhaps even dated one of them, but can’t remember, because the faces of some of those boys have blurred and become pretty abstract signifiers over the past 13+ years.
I sent the video off to my lifelong best friend, who was more than likely on the perimeter of that shot, somewhere to the left or right of the camera, singing along to whoever may have happened to be playing (was it Hot Water Music? The Bouncing Souls? It must have been a teenage favorite, as I seem to know all of the stop/starts, all of the vocal moments that deserve finger-points). He was definitely shaken up by it, as was I. But why? What’s so strange about it? What about it feels a little off-putting? I sent a link to MLA, who wrote back, in his typical and delightfully concise way, “Cameras are crazy.”
And that became a beginning, a way to sort out what was intensely affecting me. I was fourteen when this video was taken. A fourteen year old girl, the sort who walked through the world the way most fourteen year old girls do: feeling hyperbolically watched, intensively observed, and not at all because of a budding awareness of control societies and surveillance culture, but for reasons that have more to do with what Laura Mulvey has termed ‘to-be-looked-at-ness,’ the forceful injunctions we negotiate regarding the molding of our bodies to become objects of aesthetic and erotic consumption. Of course, these two phenomena (the commoditization of girls’ bodies and control societies) are interlinked, but my awareness of the former was infinitely stronger than the latter at that young age; I was infinitely more interested in feminism though I, of course, hated cops, security guards, and closed-circuit cameras the way any good punk does. Part of my resistance to the commodization of my flesh was my deliberate placing of it in the milieu of the circle pit; taking up space, refusing to understand my body as object and coming to inhabit it as a sort of weapon of counter-attack. The shitty thing was, growing up, that this often contributed to a sort of subcultural eroticization. Every punk girl has stories about groping and harassment in the sort of situation pictured here; it happened to me, too, repeatedly. An old story regarding our objectification in spaces of resistance.
And how, so many years later, I find in my inbox this (potentially feminist?) valorization of young punk girls; looped and spliced video footage of girls in the pit attached to a track entitled “Quiet Long Enough.” Which is, on the one hand, maybe sweet, and on the other, feels a little creepy. All those years ago, I was being taped? I was being watched and I had no idea, even there, even in that circle pit? The inner paranoiac yelps “I knew it! I knew it all along!” And now, here that moment is, anonymized and rendered a mythified (in the Barthesian sense) instance of feminine insubordination (look at these little girls, being pushed around and nevertheless insisting on disquiet!)
Strange, strange, strange.
–HJM
Filed under: Everything's Political, Gender Thangs, The Jam, Laura Mulvey, Myth, Peter Broderick, Quiet Long Enough, Roland Barthes, to-be-looked-at-ness
