Just watched this recently. Hadn't seen many of the videos in a while, still enjoyed them.
Did anyone see the documentaries on the second disc? I'm not sure how I feel about the Lance Bangs piece in which Jonze becomes the character of "Richard Couffey" (the nerdy white guy who dances in the Fatboy Slim video) in total method Kaufmanesque commitment as the Torrance California dance troupe prepares for their 1999 mtv awards performance.
While Jonze's performance as Couffey is a fascinating showcase of his abilities as a performer, the mannerisms and subtleties adopted by Jonze made it a eerily convincing transformation, I'm not exactly comfortable with what the result is.
It seems like the other members of the dance troupe might be real people who Jonze engages in the "prank" for the purpose of being laughed at by the pop stars in the audience and the hipsters in his entourage. It seems like he's using these culture jamming techniques that would be more interesting if he somehow disrupted the media event in a way that offered a biting or amusing critique of aristocratic celebrity or mtv's glamour aesthetic. Instead the Coffey character just seems to masochisticly mock non fashionable people.
I don't know. I was wondering if I was alone in being bothered by this.
― theodore fogelsanger, Sunday, 25 July 2004 02:14 (twenty-one years ago)
I'm not sure if the "Torrance Community Dance Troupe" were unaware of the prank--it seemed to me they were more likely some of Spike's friends, or hired actors. If not, yeah, there's definitely some major ethical issues involved if these folks were not paid.
"It seems like he's using these culture jamming techniques that would be more interesting if he somehow disrupted the media event in a way that offered a biting or amusing critique of aristocratic celebrity or mtv's glamour aesthetic."
In a way, though, that's exactly what he's doing. Holding a distorted mirror up to the celebrity no-talents in the crowd and saying "see how little it takes to get up on this stage?" Although I'm sure many in the crowd didn't see this aspect of it, and just saw the self-effacing humor, nonetheless it was communicated.
The transformation of Jones to Couffey is not too drastic of a transformation either. Jones is a pretty awkward guy socially, from what I've heard, and has long used this "personality" characters to get by.
A good article on Spike--
http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/movies/features/1267/
― jay blanchard (jay blanchard), Sunday, 25 July 2004 12:36 (twenty-one years ago)
they knew who he actually was. him and roman coppola were part of the troupe... one of the dancers kept some diary that got published somewhere that demonstrates that they knew it was meant to be funny.
― firstworldman (firstworldman), Wednesday, 28 July 2004 17:09 (twenty-one years ago)