Kayfabe, Kitsch and Komedy Sports

Unreality in Art, Politics and Entertainment

My wife Karen and I spent the last few days in the most beautiful city in America, Savannah, Georgia.  We went on several house tours and historical tours, and here’s one of the things we saw in the Green-Meldrim house …

At first I thought this was just one of many well-wrought busts in the house, this one of a Roman figure in some sort of toga - until you look more closely and you notice … sideburns! - sideburns and something other than a Roman haircut.  The docent explained that this was a depiction of a friend of Mr. Green’s, the house’s wealthy owner, commissioned by Green.  This is what you would call a “conceit” - and it’s a very 19th century sort of thing.  Well done as it is, I think this qualifies as kitsch.

As does this (almost) …

I don’t know who painted this scene of the visit of the Three Wise Men, but it also has a 19th century look and it is similar to this 17th century French School original …

Note the difference in the Blessed Virgin in what I take to be the later painting (the first one above).

In that one, she has a halo; her face is almost the kind of portrait you’d see on a cheap 19th to 20th century prayer card.  It has more than a hint of an unreal air-brushed look, a look that is not so much ethereal as lifeless and perfect - and perfectly empty. There is something unreal and sentimental about that Mary - although the technique that renders her is quite good.

Again, in my mind, this is heading toward kitsch.

But what is kitsch?  Wikipedia actually has an excellent article on it.

Kitsch is less about the thing observed than about the observer. According to Roger Scruton, "Kitsch is fake art, expressing fake emotions, whose purpose is to deceive the consumer into thinking he feels something deep and serious

… when, of course, he doesn’t.  Kitsch, in other words, is the visual equivalent of sentimental melodrama, a work of art that does not challenge assumptions and plays to our comfortable prejudices.  Wikipedia continues … 

According to the narrator [of The Unbearable Lightness of Being], kitsch is "the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements" [i.e, mere empty posturing]; however, where a society is dominated by a single political movement, the result is "totalitarian kitsch":

Which brings us to our would-be totalitarian strongman, the weakman Donald J. Trump.

Bill Pruitt, who worked on The Apprentice, tells us of the sleight of hand, the unreality that is “Reality TV”, the facades and false fronts that served us what we wanted to see on that show.  And what did we want to see?  Did we want to see the real - and horrifyingly narcissistic rapist felon Donald Trump - or did we want to see Captain Kirk with orange skin?  The answer is obvious. We wanted to see what bad art and bad politics is eager to give us: our buddy with sideburns becoming a Roman hero; the Virgin Mary becoming an air-brushed still life.  Pruitt talks of filming at Trump’s Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City, a setting that is supposed to convey the idea that Trump is capable and successful.  However …

Reality is another matter altogether. The lights in the casino’s sign are out. Hong Kong investors actually own the place—Trump merely lends his name. The carpet stinks, and the surroundings for Simpson’s concert are ramshackle at best. We shoot around all that.

They shoot around all that, they cut Trump’s use of the “n-word”, they edit with added voice-overs because Trump can’t remember the contestants’ names.  Pruitt’s piece is fascinating and it makes it clear that Trump is “trumped up”, an empty shell made popular by a kind of Professional Wrestling kitschy show biz con game melodramatic fictionalizing. Wrestlers call it “kayfabe”.

Speaking of Professional Wrestling, if you wanted to apply to something else that same “kayfabe”that serves (as in wrestling) to take an actual sport, an actual athletic competition, and make it into a mere spectacle (albeit one that’s entertaining and fun), you’d come up with banana-ball and the Savannah Bananas.

The Savannah Bananas are a blast (just like Professional Wrestling)!  We paid a pretty penny for some Stubhub tickets to see them in action last night, sitting way out in the left field bleachers.  It’s circus clowning meets baseball - except it’s not baseball.

Here’s a video I took from 400 feet away of the “world’s tallest batter” of the Bananas being pitched to by a “Firefighters” player on a ladder …

Notice that the music never stops.  In MLB games, each player has a “walk up song”, but the song ends as soon as the batter steps into the plate.  In banana-ball, the music never ends, including such classings as “Baby Shark” and every popular party tune you’ve ever heard - all cranked up to eleven.  There was a lot of clowning and dancing, and I had a lot of fun … but it wasn’t baseball.  For one thing, the rules bear almost no resemblance to baseball; and for another, baseball’s poetry and drama, the conflict of the struggle, the long moments of tension - the actual challenge of the sport - was entirely absent.

But banana-ball does not pretend to be anything other than a kind of circus.  Even the cheerleaders are clowns (they are overweight middle aged men and grandmas, the “Banana Nanas”) …

This sort of thing is fun and harmless because it’s unpretentious - even for a baseball purist like me, who can’t even stand the Designated Hitter rule.  I can enjoy both banana-ball and baseball, because one does not pretend to be the other.

But when we see mere spectacle or the pandering to mere sensation or sentimentality in politics, art and religion … then Wikipedia gets it right when it says that …

… kitsch "offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, without sublimation"

… and (in the case of MAGA), without regard to reality.

It appears democracy is sinking - and it’s all going down the drain, everything but the kitsch-en sink.