Crazy Eyes
What I learned from Jill Biden's Nutcracker dance.
The internet was broken twice this week, by two very different videos. I do mean “broken”: not only did these two clips go viral, they also scrambled political signals and revealed a genuine dispute about how to interpret the shadow-play that flickers regularly across our screens.
The first video, a trailer for the independent studio A24’s forthcoming movie, Civil War, pits President Nick Offerman against what is presumably going to be a plucky rebel alliance of outlaws and immigrants in California and Texas.
The second, a Christmas video produced under the imprimatur of Dr. Mrs. First Lady Jill Biden, featured some very squiggly tap dancing and a loose interpretation of the Nutcracker Suite. The performers were from Dorrance Dance, a company devoted to educating the public about “white privilege, systemic racism, white fragility, and anti-racism.”
I will let you guess which one of these videos featured Jesse Plemons as a sinister knuckle-dragging fascist. Neither one was more than 2.5 minutes long. But both functioned a little bit like Rorschach tests: either Jill’s holiday wishes were innocent entertainment, or they were pure nightmare fuel designed to subtly foment anti-white racism. Either Civil War will be harmless dystopian fiction, or it’s predictive programming designed to normalize civic violence ahead of 2024.
Both disputes divided people, and not necessarily along party lines, into benefit-of-the-doubters and entrail-readers. Benefit-of-the-doubters are disinclined to read hostility into messages of ostensible good will. They are wary of conspiratorial thinking and anxious to take their fellow Americans in good faith.
Entrail-readers find this attitude naive—especially when extended toward political operatives who routinely characterize their opposition as dangerous extremists, while they themselves can’t stage so much as a 2-minute dance pageant without subliminally lobbying for reparations.
I confess I am sympathetic to this latter attitude, especially after COVID taught me again and again that the authorities I had been trained to trust would simply lie about their intentions to manipulate me. But I also see how easily entrail reeding can veer out of control.
Defaulting to suspicion, even in an era when deceit is the norm, does leave you open to a different kind of credulity. It primes you to believe whatever theory attributes the most deviously coordinated malice to your enemies. It can also end you up in an unfalsifiable loop, denouncing anyone who suggests a less than maximally hostile theory of the case as a traitor or a dupe out of hand.
All that having been said, I actually think the White House’s weird diversity dance party makes its own argument that something beneath the surface is not as it seems. The vibe of the thing itself is characterized first and foremost by insincerity: it oozes forced cheer.
That’s what bothered me most about it, more than the strange arm-flailing or the Donnie Darko bunny lookalike. (I think he was supposed to be a mouse?) Great tap dancing is marked by nothing so much as ease and effortless charm. This video, on the other hand, exudes a kind of manic desperation. It’s an over-eager theater kid aesthetic: the grins on the faces of the dancers seem frantic, even desperate.
Which makes it feel conspiratorial in an entirely different sort of way. Art reveals, sometimes against the artist’s best intentions, the spiritual character of the enterprise it serves. I don’t actually think Jill Biden wanted to suffuse her holiday video with a sense of menace. But it emerged all the same, because menace is what’s in the air when political tensions are high enough to make a movie about civil war seem like a plausible commentary on current affairs.
For centuries after Plato suggested that our daily perceptions are akin to shadow-puppets on the wall of an underground prison, ancient philosophers fretted over the challenges of sēmeiōsis. This was their word for trying to figure out how what we observe on the surface relates to what we can know about the realities underneath. The internet is tossing up a head-splitting concatenation of imagery and signs, making it difficult to know how to detect false flags and correctly link outward forms to inward truths.
Maybe that, as much as anything else, is what has left us in confusion over the appropriate amount of skepticism, over what counts as conspiracy theory and what’s just a straight-up conspiracy. Under such conditions, it’s actually possible that art is a more reliable teacher than news or commentary—if you know how to read it.
I don’t have any sure-fire way of sifting information from misinformation. But I do think it’s interesting, and maybe even a little stabilizing, to realize that artistic expression remains almost frighteningly impossible to falsify. You can tap dance through the Oval Office all you want, but you can’t fake joy.
Lying and misdirection is easy in a thicket of shadows. But the spirit of the age, for good or ill, is moving underneath—look close and you can see its silhouette.
Rejoice evermore,
Spencer
Listen to the latest from Young Heretics:
Summary: Stop contributing to the dissolution of civil society by being distrustful about tap dance clips.
Hi, Spencer! I just became a paid subscriber so I could comment on this. My underlying biases are that I'm a benefit-of-the-doubter down to my bones, and also I have not lived in the United States for over a decade and am increasingly out of touch with American culture for that reason.
With those caveats: I'm sorry, I don't see how either of these things could engender fear in a psychologically healthy person. "Civil War" looks like a solid action flick. "28 Days Later" is the best zombie movie of all time, in my opinion, so I'd probably see "Civil War," too--it's from the same director and it looks like they have the same vibe. Also, the Nutcracker-inspired tap dance was cute. Sure, the rat costume was a little weird, but the rat character in The Nutcracker is supposed to be scary. Sugarplum Fairy, in contrast, is adorable, also just as she's supposed to be.
To quote an adage from an earlier fractured time, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
You claim here that the tap dance video has an unintentional air of menace because that's what's in the air. But how do you know that that air of menace isn't just causing you to interpret something innocuous as menacing? I'm not breathing your air of menace, and I don't see the video as anything but cute. Analogously, if I'm living in a society that's obsessed with sexual harassment, and a guy I don't know compliments me on my Christmas dress, is that a threat, or is it that he just likes my dress and is trying to be nice?
I think this is important because I share your concern that American civil society is really hurting, and that is driven by mutual distrust. Distrust can easily become a self-perpetuating cycle. To use the dress compliment analogy again: If we start by interpreting some apparent compliments as threats, then in short order the only guys complimenting women's dresses will be creepy, because we've pushed the boundaries of what is considered normal behavior into such tight constraints--normal guys, who do not want to be seen as creepy, will stop complimenting dresses. The way to stop that from happening is to assume that compliments are sincere, even if your (known to be error prone!) spidey-senses are tingling in some vague way. I think you have seen the way this analogous situation has been playing out in the USA.
So you feel feelings about a piece of art in a world that is confusing and threatening, and then claim that "artistic expression remains almost frighteningly impossible to falsify." Ok, but it's also frighteningly impossible to know how to interpret exactly, which is why it's art. Your feelings about what it means are at least as much about you as about its reality. Your feelings will become more error-prone in the distrust direction as you live in a more distrustful society.
So then, you have a choice: do I interpret this in the distrustful way, or do I take it at face value? It's a single small decision to say "sometimes a tap dance is only a tap dance," but a lot of those decisions are what add up to a more mutually trusting, less fragmented society. Perhaps there is a shady spirit of the age there in the background--but you don't have to give it power by believing in it, just like any other ghost.