M.I.A.: "Born Free"

Some immediate and unresolved reactions upon an initial viewing and subsequent re-viewing of M.I.A.’s “Born Free” video, which was introduced this week along with a host of other material designed to promote her forthcoming album:

1. It is entirely valid to ask Americans (because, given the patches on the video’s antagonists’ shoulders, they are obviously the intended audience, and not because they should be held more responsible for thinking about or responding to genocide than, say, a Canadian like me) to consider what it would be like if those in positions of authority in their country targeted and executed a subset of the population on the basis of an arbitrary genetic factor. This is happening in the world, and to the degree portrayed in M.I.A.’s video. I will stop here to keep from seeming as if I am lecturing or assuming a position of some knowledgeable, principled superiority, though I will append an encouragement to Google “Sri Lankan Civil War 2009.”

2. It is also entirely valid to suggest that the situation detailed in the video does not display much of the dense, befuddling, and longstanding complexities that contribute to the escalation of a situation into genocide. Though clearly genocide is so unjustifiable as to render this very sentence redundant and simply me covering my ass, the imprecision of the narrative here seems designed to abstain from speaking to any specific situation, and so the viewer is left with the uncontested point that genocide is horrific and unjustifiable. The problem being that those perpetrators of genocide are almost never of the belief that they are perpetrating genocide for unjustifiable reasons, but are rather hopelessly deluded or brainwashed into believing that they are doing something if not good then necessary, or are forced by economic and social means and fear to pursue the agenda of other, more powerful agents. Though this video is clearly not aimed at perpetrators of genocide, but at the American mainstream audience, one assumes with the hope that they will more clearly understand and become sensitive to certain realities, it is unclear who, upon viewing this video, will understand or agree more with its underlying contention than they did before, and if they did what they would then feel empowered to do about it. This video then seems to differ only in degree to the PC epithet that to raise awareness, or to become more aware, is roughly equivalent to political action, not unlike America’s Next Top Model calling attention to the intensely complex problem of homelessness via a sexy photo shoot.

3. Question: does the video imply that its audience does not have a position on or sufficient understanding of racism and/or genocide, and, if so, is this infantalization of the audience warranted by the continued criminal occurrence of genocide?

4. Also: is it cynical to suggest that because this video was instantly framed as shocking and controversial even before most viewers had a chance to view and so be shocked by it and raise the discussion attendant to controversy, that its shock and controversy is perforce by commercial strategy? If this is in fact the case, is it okay for a video with a message that is clearly moral in nature to manufacture a sense of its own subversiveness in order to convey said message?

5. The Vice Magazine website currently features a flash animation that elaborates upon the central sequence of the video during which a child is exploded by a landmine. The animation replays the explosion while giving the effect that the gory remains of the child are then hurled at the screen, where they splat and begin to run and eventually spell out the letters “M.I.A.”.This direct conflation of the substance of the video’s message and the promotion materials used to sell M.I.A.’s forthcoming album—and thus the ongoing and direct conflation of politics with M.I.A.’s brand—is simultaneously and intentionally upsetting and thoroughly modern, a neo-commercial platform that shivers with and is inextricably tied to a mimetic resonance and the underlying principle that to venture ever further into the void of darker imaginations is only natural.

6. The above ideas about commercialism were presciently pioneered with as much visceral moral conflict but a greater degree of self-awareness in J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash.

7. Speaking of self-awareness, how shocking and controversial is a video whose essential narrative thrust is the gory execution of children but whose violence is no sicker than at least two of the scenes from the mostly playful and self-aware movie Kick-Ass, one in which a man is exploded in an industrial microwave, and another wherein a man is crushed to death with a pulpy and nauseating pop in a car compactor while he screams for his life? How indicative is the violence employed in this video of the anachronism of the shock tactic? Are we, cognitively and creatively, as post-violence as we are post-modern? Is the authenticity with which we allow violence to touch us as easily called into question as the authenticity with which we consume product meant to evoke any strong emotion?