Dirty?

Hild,

- "All work is cleaning up."

I enjoyed your pensées on the Kanye West video. And they chimed with some thoughts I’ve been having about the presentation of dirt and grime in pre-Kerfuffle art. Generally, the default mode of social realism seems to be that you highlight the dirt, dust and grime. It’s part of laying claim to authenticity – the fact that it’s difficult to remove stains; that ‘real’ life leaves blemishes. The default mode of the hyper-utopianism of advertising features is, of course, the contrary: that the special recipe of Cillit Bang, or whatever the hell else, will provide an easily obtainable, stain-free existence – however filthy you might happen to be.

The Victorians seem to have been gloriously dirty. Dickens’s novels are replete with grime, soot, smoke and fog. It tarnishes the buildings, billows from backslaps, gathers in the cuticles. Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Watson seem to possess a predilection for surprising criminals by entering their lairs via murky back-passages; a Freudian preference shared by Dr Jekyl’s alter-ego, Mr Hyde. Before the invention of thermoplastics, chrome and Domestos, dirt (both literal and moral) was all pervasive: simply an unavoidable condition of existence.

But in the twentieth century, once technology rendered dirt optional rather than inherent, the signification changes. Artistic visions of the future begin to develop a dialectic of dirtiness: dystopian fiction/film can be sub-categorised according to how dirty the landscapes are: Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is appropriately filthy; Huxley’s Brave New World is clean as a laboratory (so long as you’re not a primitive); Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker bogtrots and revels through murk and muck; the landscape of I, Robot (and most other Hollywood engendered dystopias) is chromatic and shiny to the point of sterility.

A common trope in the cleanly variety of such films is the disturbance created by the sudden appearance of blood, dirt or any other bodily effluvia within an otherwise clinical environment: an alien bursts out through its host’s abdomen, and the camera shows blood spattering on the shiny scalpels and lab-coats; or, a quarantined victim of a super-virus coughs up blood on the plate-glass windows of his laboratory-prison. It’s post-Enlightenment anxiety about the limits of Science in a single, cinematic frame: we have finally built a world devoid of dirt and stains and, look! this mucky human stuff we thought we had eradicated has contaminated our utopia yet again.

Unsurprising that the pre-Kerfufflians note a correspondence between cleanliness (or, rather, dirtiness) and moral character. They even have an idiom: “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” But I’ve heard conflicting interpretations of its meaning. Most seem to think it refers to cleanliness being adjacent to godliness, as in a sort of synonym for godliness. One or two contrarians, however, claim it suggests that cleanliness is a sham substitute for godliness, that the cleanly are somehow masking their lack of moral depth behind a shiny veneer. I prefer the latter, but it’s clearly the deviant reading.

But action/adventure films, particularly in the 1990s, did employ this deviant reading: the hero had to be prepared to get himself dirty, as Bruce Willis, for example, always did – his increasing filthiness towards the end of the Lethal Weapon films is the badge of his courage and moral strength; the villain, however, typically has an aversion to dirt (or some sort of O.C.D.), and this is the signifier of his wickedness.

Kanye West seems imprisoned in the clinical austerity of his ‘Love Lockdown’, but even the sweat and body-paint of the tribal dancers that signify his inner dirtiness is – as you point out – sanitized. Consider, then, by way of comparison, the presentation of dirt in Christina Aguilera’s ‘Dirty’, in which the protagonist claims repetitively “I wanna get dirty”.

It’s easy to see from the video what she means by this (the entire thing is a visual euphemism almost entirely devoid of wit or subtlety), but I was intrigued more by the lack of actual dirt. Even though literal dirt is clearly beside the point, you’d think they might have included a bit more to serve the obvious metaphor. Sure, it’s a bit sweaty, there’s graffiti on the walls, some bare-knuckle boxing, weight-lifting, break-dancing, and some sloshing about in a pool of water that seems to have leaked through the roof of a disused warehouse. It’s not clean enough to eat your dinner on, but neither is it particularly unsanitary. It reads as the somewhat timid attempt by someone who’s been raised in an anally-retentive environment to break free of the shackles of an aversion to dirt; like a child who’s trying, too late, by playing with some new 'dirty' friends, to discover the pleasures of rolling about in the mud, but can’t quite override her conditioning. Or, more to the point, a bleachy-clean child-star from the Disney Channel announcing a new artistic direction and set of influences. Not so much Cillit Bang as...(well, something else). I’m not sure we should show this to Hengist I. But I suspect you'll have more to say on this item.