1998

Jude Tallichet and Laura Parnes Interview
For Very Magazine
No Is Yes

Jude Tallichet: I love this quote where No Is Yes is described as an "art video which reads like a dark, over-medicated after school special". Why did you decide to use youth culture as your focus?

Laura Parnes: I’m interested in the marketing of transgression and its effect on youth culture. The real focus of No Is Yes is on the co-option of counter-culture told through two teenage girls who accidentally kill and mutilate their favorite rock star. Basically the girls are teenage drug dealers, incredibly angry… about what, they have no idea. (Ha). Identifying with a lot of packaged angry characters like the rock star.

JT: It is interesting to me that the characters have had their desires commodified and sold back to them. It seems this is where their anger stems from because they don't no what they're feeling, so it comes out in this packaged form.

LP: I think transgression, having the ability to allow you to step outside of the confines of society, this is what they desperately want. Like an unrequited love story… to just say "no" to everything.

JT: That's the way the movie starts out. She is walking down the street smoking a cigarette and she stops dead in her tracks and she says, "No I'm not going to school,…".

LP: I wanted to open it with that in order to bring up the question, "What is she actually saying no to"? In the middle of her speech she performs this fetishized practice of opening her Marlboro cigarettes package and turning one cigarette around to make a wish. Her belief system is clearly rooted in consumerism, smoking and the brand names. This accentuates the preposterousness of her attempts to say "no" . In a sense they (Tess and Torrie) do transgress. It's just a very mediated form of transgression. Everything they do is mediated. I feel that that's the way we live our lives now. There is no immediate primal experience. To try to recapture that is ridiculous and impossible, but that doesn't mean that everything is an advertisement for soda pop either.

JT: The way you handled the film, the level of artistry, it's sort of like MTV. It's stylish, it's beautiful, it's fast moving, like advertising. I think that adds to that feeling too. That mediated artifice.

LP: Definitely. The set was like an installation, It was not a teenage girls bedroom, but an art directors' idea of a teenage girls bedroom. So it's removed from reality. So when the kids saw the set, they were like "Woah, I want a room like this" as opposed to "Hey, I have a room like this."

JT: You use them as a vehicle, because they're like a market to you. They're the most tapped market of our culture.

LP: They are where rebellion is really used as a marketing device, because kids have some money and all this free time. They're like the perfect consumer because they're on vacation 2 .4.7. That allows them to really believe there're rebelling because there're not in that mode of work, come home, family etc...

JT: Your dialogue is so fascinating because it's like a puzzle. What about the mixing of theory and the dialogue from popular films.

LP: "A makeover, a semblance of order in a world of chaos". That's from Clueless.

JT: And that could totally be from Baudrillard.

LP: Language is super important to this piece. Some of the references appear to be extremely banal, but they can sometimes be serious and critical.

JT: Torrie comes off as the smart one, there is some hilarious dialogue in the club where she asks Jimmy Junk "if the song ‘The Eye’ is about Bataille or something?" and he says "Actually the song about my eye is just about my eye." What is the relationship between transgression theory and transgression? I know that you're seeing a connection because you use the Situationists, and you use Bataille, and at the end she (the dominatrix) pulls out the Foucault book.

LP: Each theoretical reference is so loaded I can't lump them all together. The Situationists wrote theory for a revolution. They are very different from most theoretical groups because they believed in action. The idea of the situation itself is about creating a situation in life, which allows you to escape from the mediation in society- the spectacle.

JT: Do you see that as a way they can escape having their desires commodified and sold back to them?

LP: No, I don't see an escape actually. The Situationists were instantly marketed. After 1960's (and the failed May revolt in Paris), Malcolm McClaren started to marketing punk rock. He used Situationist's slogans on t-shirts- as a marketing tool. They were immediately commodified. I don't believe that comodified desire is not real desire. There is no escape from co-option or mediation.

JT: But it is possible for them to get out of their situation.

LP: The Situationist had such an influence on punk rock- Gang of Four etc.... The language is nihilistic and romantic. It really encapsulates punk rock ideas of being outside of society. Punk rock was marketed once and now its being marketed again. There is a brief period of time where things exist outside of commodity and then there is an endless weird circle of things going back and forth.

JT: It's weird. It makes me think "was the murder commodified transgression or was it really their way out?"

LP: I think it's both.

JT: It can be both.