True Story

Written for Felix, Volume 2, Number 2, by Sue de Beer

No is Yes, a feature-length video by Laura Parnes, tells the story of Tess and Tori, two young drug dealers who accidentally kill their favorite rock star. The video has all the trimmings of an independent film, shot with a script, cast and crew, and has been described as an "art video which reads as a dark, over-medicated after school special."

The bulk of the video transpires in the bedroom of the two attractive teenage girls, who are constantly consuming, absorbing and acting upon images fed to them from television, fashion magazines, beat poets, and rock lyrics. In fact their bedroom, a set created by Parnes, seems to be lifted straight from a rock video, or MTV's "real world", with products strategically placed within the camera's eye: Clearasil bottles, Teen Spirit deodorant, Punky hair dye, Orbits soda. Their actions always seem one step removed, filtered through movies, TV broadcasts, ad campaigns, and a particularly strong rock star fetish. Even the drugs that they consume and sell are the drugs of after school specials - marijuana, Crystal Methadrine, and Xanax. The dialog is a combination of teenage banter and cutup technique, referencing such diverse sources as William Burroughs and the Situationist International Movement, Clueless, and 50's melodramas. The dialog mimics the technique of the video itself, a Major Network Movie of the Week punctuated by montaged advertising footage from the likes of Michelob, Calvin Kline and Nike. The resultant film looks like an abortive fusion of "Dawson's Creek" and Goddard. The opening scene of No is Yes begins with a close up of Tori describing a spring morning's walk to school. Smoking a cigarette, she stops dead in her tracks and declares:

"NO I'm not going to school,
NO I'm not going home
NO I'm not gonna to use that pretty fucking smile of mine"

Parnes: "I wanted to open it with that because what is she actually saying no to? In the middle of it she has this fetishized practice of opening her Marlboro cigarette package and turning one cigarette around to make a wish. An obscured belief system that's connected to consumerism, the smoking and the brand name and the preposterousness of that bringing about any possibility of "no". In a sense, they do transgress. Its just a very mediated form of transgression. Everything they do is mediated. I feel that's the way we live our lives now. There is no immediate primal experience. To try to recapture that is ridiculous and impossible"

The pop band Pulp's Jarvis Cocker, lyricist, lead singer, songwriter, threads a stylish melancholia through his lyrics and music, which are layered with references to movies, TV, advertising and porn. The cover art for This is Hardcore, their most recent LP, (art directed by John Currin) is a series of carefully constructed photographs which appear to simultaneously be a fashion shoot, a seventies movie, and a soft-core porn shoot in process. The band members lounge off to the side in each image, positioned as unresponsive voyeurs to the spectacle unfolding before them. Each song seems to be a sort of lullaby to mediation, with Cocker sliding between the roles of director, audience, and actor in the drama.

I've seen all the pictures,
I've studied them forever.
I wanna make a movie so lets star in it together.
Don't make a move untill I say "Action."

In a recent issue of "Interview Magazine", Cocker talks about this position of self-conscious voyeurism:

"I believe that people nowadays are so used to the mediated version of things that when the real thing comes along it doesn't seem as real. During my accident, I remember hanging from the window ledge and thinking, this is actually a dramatic situation, but it doesn't seem dramatic. In a film, there'd have been good camera angles and music heightening the tension of the scene, but of course there wasn't any of that, and it was actually a very mundane, pathetic thing that was happening. It was like my fingers were losing their grip, and I had to make a decision whether to allow myself to slip off or just let go. And I went, "One, two, three--let go." And then, bang. But the point is, I was mediating it even as it was happening. I don't know whether this is a common thing. I think it must be because people are brought up with a TV, and often you see things before you experience them. You see people kissing and falling on love on the telly before you get around to doing it yourself, and you can end up semijaded before you've actually done anything."

The mirrored similarity between the Jarvis Cocker and Parnes' statements is startling -- Jarvis the rock star talking about mediated experience in terms of camera angles and cinema techniques, and Laura the director talking about mediated experience through a film plot that hinges on the death of a rock star. Their resultant works only emphasize this odd pairing, with Cocker's pop songs and Parnes' artwork creating a complex and constantly shifting narrative which slides the viewer/listner between watching the experience, watching the image of the experience, watching the charcters watching the experience, and watching the characters watching the image of the experience. It is an endlessly and infinately repeating cycle of voyeurism, almost fractel-like in structure.

Obviously, Cocker and Parnes' work owes a huge debt to Warhol, among others. Self awareness in the eyes of the media is evident in such Warhol repeat silk-screens as "National Velvet" and White Burning Car 3". In these paintings Warhol appropriated existing media imagery, making each image a "Warhol". He then repeated his own "Warhol" - annihilating the whole concept of the "original Warhol" in the process. In a sense, Warhol was mediating his own images. Warhol, in 1963, felt compelled to make the point that there was an "original" to be co-opted in the first place. What Cocker and Parnes now understand, is that there is no longer the need for trope of repetition to make the point of self-mediation. What Cocker and Parnes are creating is not a lament, or angry tirade against media saturation. There is no separation between Cocker's marketing techniques and his melancholy pose - the song is the advertisement for the record. Nike, now the proud sponsor of transgression, with celebrity spokespersons such as William Burroughs and Iggy Pop, accessorize Tess and Tori's rebellious angst. Cocker and Parnes' works creates a new self awareness and a mutability between the audience, the artist, and the actor in each fictive drama. For Cocker and Parnes, the mediated holds the promise of a varied and complex existence, full of purpose and a will to act, even and especially if the action has been defined by something they saw on TV.

Tori: Style is more than a pose,
These shoes are more real than my feet,
My immoral yet regulated passion,
Just Do It.

SUE DE BEER