Behold! I have returned from the temporal Siberia that is book publication and promotion and should be posting again as of now. And what better way to return than with an episode of South Park?
If you haven’t already seen it, everyone should watch the entire episode here. Then we can meet up in the comments below and chat about a few things.
There’s a lot that could be said. In fact, I’ve been involved in a conversation on Vampire Freaks about the timeline and influence of one Gothic on another (the influence of one Gothic on a Goth?).
I said: Well VF is probably not very representative of Goth-dom, and that’s part of my miscalculation here. I’ll own that. That said, the “Gothic” goes back 250 years now, predating punk by quite a bit, and plenty of those folks were rather conservative.
He said: Thats a whole other kind of Goth, no direct connection with the modern subculture.
I said: Well my whole graduate study (with loans that I’ll be paying off for the next two decades) is predicated on the idea that there is continuity in the Gothic from the French Revolution to the present, so I sure hope you’re wrong …, and I respectfully disagree. 😛
All this stuff is connected, and if it wasn’t, it’d be a lot less interesting. Goths are strongly partial to flawed historical interpretations of their own movement that make it irrelevant and dull.
What do you think about the episode?
To start, did it seem that that the Goths were treated with nominally more respect than the Vamps, or were they equally caricatures?
And when do we start talking about Twilight?
HA! This is a good one. I would point out one sort of framing issue to your discussion. You ask if the Goths are treated nominally better than the Vamps, and I would suggest that they probably are. However, remember that the Goths did not originate in this episode, and may be benefiting from a bias in favor of established characters. Put another way, the episode may be using these established characters as a means to respond to the Vamps, rather than as a foil through which to compare and contrast the two movements.
Why should this bear on the critique? For one thing, because the South Park Goths are essentially correct in their assertion that they had claim to the particular style first. Correct both in the sense that the characters originate before the Vamp characters, and in the sense of the real world historical fact of gothic punk subculture, which has existed since at least the late 1970’s. Which is not to say that the cultural influence of the vampire does not pre-date that era, or that it was in a state of wane at such time as to make the primacy of gothic punk a de facto practicality. No, vampires have been an significant archetype for centuries, and indeed the impact of vampires on the gothic punk subculture is as obvious as it is undeniable. See, for example, Bauhaus, or The Hunger.
The innovation of the post-Twilight vampire movement, and by association the South Park Vamps, is the identification qua vampire. Vampirism has always been a small minority of the gothic punk subculture, a sub-subculture limited to those lifestyle fetishists who (perhaps overly) romanticized the object of blood. And this sub-subculture has tended toward a literal, if ceremonial, vampirism – the ritual consumption of blood. Mainstream gothic punk adherents have merely taken asthetic cues from vampires, and only particular species of vampires at that. To suggest that Goths, even Vampire Goths, identified as, rather than with, vampires is to ignore the specific and well documented role vampires have played in those movements. In contrast, the South Park Vamps (and Butters, most purely) essentially believed themselves to be vampires, complete with strains of evil and the attendant powers (though, curiously, few of the limitations). Even if one were to dispute the use of a belief schema in this context, it is inescapable that the fundamental relationship between the vampire and the adherents in question is different in the case of Goths than it is in the case of Vamps, and that the Vamp relationship is fundamentally closer.
I believe that this is a necessary result of the context of a post-Twilight vampire movement, and more particularly of the tension between the specific strengths and weaknesses inherent in a Twilight etiology. There is not room here to explore that tension, but it could generally be described as that which results from a successful humanization of vampires in an unsuccessful literature of vampire. Unsuccessful not in the commercial sense, mind you, and not simply in a narrative sense, but in a more broadly literary sense.
But again, there is not room in one comment: there truly is a lot to talk about here. Enjoy.
-alan1
P.S. Check out “Licecapades”, my personal favorite SP episode.
In the episode, one of the sticking points against the Vampire kids is that they dressed like the Goths but failed to indulge in self-destructive behaviors, like staying up all night drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. Instead, they drink tomato juice and get both rest and, I assume, a daily dose of UV rays. As such, the episode seemed to declare that the path to legitimacy lay through suffering, which is an assumption that we’re all familiar with (the starving artist, the alcoholic yet brilliant writer, the UChicago undergrad, etc.).
In terms of South Park humor, the Goths deserve to be ridiculed as much as the Vampire kids, but it looks like a generation of suffering convinced the writers to throw the Goths a bone in this episode.
I feel compelled to comment on one aspect of Flawed’s analysis: the notion of co-option as a manifestation of threat. “[O]ne of the sticking points against the Vampire kids is that they dressed like the Goths but failed to indulge in self-destructive behaviors . . . .” That is to say, the focal point of the Goths’ anger is the Vamps’ co-option of the outward aesthetic of “goth” and the subsequent power that co-option affords the Vamps over the Goths. This, regardless of the Vamps’ apparent obliviousness to the threat they pose to the Goths. See: the scene of where the concerned principal calls the Goths into the office. To be co-opted is to be controlled through association, or rather, to loose control of one’s ability to define one’s own self-identity. This is similar to another phenomenon (perhaps) inadvertently referenced by Flawed. Flawed suggests that the UChicago undergrad experience is an exercise in “legitimacy . . . through suffering.” I would suggest (and I have it on good authority) that ten years ago the colloquial term would have been “U of C undergrad”, and that “UChicago”, a term unknown at the time, was a product of a campaign to differentiate the University of Chicago brand from other similarly named academic institutions, most specifically the University of Illinois at Chicago. I note two significant points: 1) this campaign, rumored to be an attempt to compensate for an odd inferiority complex linked to a flagging reputation in relation to the east coast Ivories, could be seen as the University of Chicago’s own Gothic campaign against the Vamps of U of I, and 2) for alumni who came up before the advent of the “Chicago Card”, such News Speak affectations represent a similar co-option of the Phoenix essence.
I’m just saying.
Well I know both of you commenters, and you were more or less contemporaries. I think that Flawed is saying UChicago as a way of identifying the school in question to my hundreds (sic) of readers from all around the world. But I hear your point and (perhaps) inadvertent double entendre in the reference to “Phoenix essence”: the U of C mascot, and the University of Phoenix.
Anyway, I was not aware that the Goths were in an earlier episode, and I do think that the points you are both making makes sense. An interesting bit of dissonance (which South Park blithely ignores) is where into the continuum do any of these characters fit? If this episode came out in 2009, and the Goth kids are, what, in 7th grade? 8th grade? You know what point I’m going to make: that these characters couldn’t have been born sooner than 1995. I remember in 95 when high school Goths that I knew were execrated as posers. Stone and Parker have to be aware of this, and the conflation of childlike characters with adult allusions is one of the more conspicuous “signatures” of South Park. In this case, it highlights something that both Goths and punks are notorious for: a defensive posture when it comes to defining membership in the subculture. “I belong, but you don’t,” but of course, there’s already someone before you making the same claim, and unless you were a member of Sisters of Mercy, there’s no court of appeal. Just your own dark bedroom.
Anyway, it’s a sign that this is a sophistocated show that the Goths can be thrown a bone and still be susceptible to their own special parody.
Also, my one caveat to Flawed’s comments is that I would sure have loved to have undergone the kind of generational suffering as Stone and Parker. I’ll bet *they* didn’t spend four years temping at a crummy hospital!