August 11, 2006
step up
Step Up adopts what we've called elsewhere the "Flashdance trope" of cultural miscegenation with considerable rigor: the female high culturist has, as usual, a dead parent and a problematic audition coming up, and her personal and professional problems must be resolved via the encouter with a male practitioner of a popular/non-white form.
The persistence of this trope speaks of two particular anxieties. One, obviously, is the fear of miscegenation itself, such that instead of actually, you know, happening, it's displaced into the cultural sphere. The other concerns the anxiety about how cultural forms which originally meant to signal autonomous identity must be recuperated into the white center, to be less threatening and more marketable.
But the center cannot hold — if we've learned anything from the ascendency of hip-hop into a quasi-universal cultural form, it's that. This might be explained in a variety of overlapping ways: as an actual demographic shift; as an image of globalization's indifference to any regime beyond capitalism itself; as the exhaustion of cultural whiteness in general. As a result, the idea of "recuperation" across ethnically/racially identifiable lines has become almost meaningless; basically, everyone's black now, except for the Aryan Nation and hipsters, two sides of one coin. And the movie knows this perfectly well. The ballet dancer actually dances more like someone in Janet Jackson's corps de funk — perhaps because that's what the actress in question was doing a couple years ago. And the film's street dancer, without much hue and cry, is without much hue: he's superduper white — which means, miracle de dieu, that the high culture chick and the street culture dude can actually make it, rather than having a brief encounter in traffic.
Indeed, this film's contribution to the genre (which turns out to be, in the same stroke, its annihilation) is to deliver the unproblematic wigger hero. He's neither an object of ridicule nor a villain; he's just the movie's lead black guy, and he just happens to be white. The movie, moreover, identifies this motion toward white black kids as ongoing, onrushing: while the film's only way to have an actual, pointedly white guy is to make him British, the wigger's younger sister turns out, in an otherwise-inexplicable aside, to be even more of a street-dancing b-girl than he is. The point is explicit: we are ever more closely approaching the moment when black/hip-hop culture is entirely naturalized as culture itself.
That's not to say that all conflicts have been somehow resolved by globalization's subsumption of cultural difference into a series of specious conveniences within a finally homogenous system. Having removed both the scrim of racial/ethnic difference and its interruption of the love story's easy progress, the film (and the logic of globalization it symptomtizes) is left with unadorned class difference, which, though it is almost the only conflict in the film beyond who will get what job in the end (these may indeed be seen as single conflict negotiated across different stages), remains peculiarly non-conflictual.
This may be because the film, while shot from the camera's point of view, nonetheless assumes everything to be understood form the perspective of its fancy people. Because there's no issue of protecting cultural identity, there's no reason — right? — for the poor kids to have any resistance to becoming rich kids. The film's wager is that dramas of cultural identity, now overcome, must cede the territory to class mobility porn. Perhaps that is "the camera's point of view" in Hollywood cinema?