“Assud” means “lion”, but it is also the name of a man-sized cartoony rabbit in the Palestinian children’s TV show Tomorrow’s Pioneers. Not unlike the more famous previous mouse Farfour, he details his search for “‘martyrdom” and promises to “eat the Jews” on air. But because that isn’t strange enough for this universe, a British studio audience actually applauded Assud on Channel 4′s most recent installment of comedy show You Have Been Watching.
“Farfour” means “butterfly” — there’s a trend here –, and Farfour looked a lot like something that was supposed to look a lot like Mickey Mouse. I love how Disney CEO Robert Iger was challenged for the corporation’s lack of protest against this use. You can practically touch his sense of strange amazement as he quite reasonably points out: “I think it should have been obvious how the company felt about the subject.” Indeed.
It is extremely difficult for me, and perhaps for most of the people I will handily refer to as ‘Western viewers’ because the issue clearly isn’t loaded with enough simple stereotypes already, to understand the adaptation of a Mickey-lookalike, or indeed any colourful happy anthropomorphized animal, to the cause of Hamas. I think that much is true independently of whatever a person might think about Hamas in general. It is simply hard to grasp why this interpretation should work, as everything about the character seems to resist it: Its general attitude, clearly continued in its new incarnation’s unaltered big childlike eyes, excited attitude, high-pitched voice and jolly movements, and not least its clearly American origin.
Assud’s new take on Bugs Bunny seems to fit the cause no better. But Assud is at least the third such character on the show, following not only Farfour but also his cousin Nahoul, who expressed a desire for “revenge upon the enemies of God, the murderers of the prophets”. Nahoul was a bumblebee.
So someone, somewhere, seems to think this works. And perhaps it does. Perhaps there is an autonomy to pop culture mechanisms that goes beyond our interpretative contexts, enabling cartoon characters to move around more freely than their audiences. At the very least, there seems to be something mechanical about the applause Assud received in Britain last week; and not canned applause either, but from a live audience which nevertheless seemed to function as well and as badly as a prerecording: A canned audience, if you will.
You Have Been Watching shows clips from British and foreign TV and has host Charlie Brooker and a weekly choice of three guests make fun of them. I find it relaxing, often more intelligent than it has any right to be, and I enjoy it. Whenever a clip ends, the lighting changes, the camera returns from the audience to the stage, and the audience laughs and applauds. It does so without fail, clearly acting on orders from the studio and loving it. This is already borderline awkward under the best of circumstances, because more often than not the show goes on to remark how awful that piece of television was; but it never really seems awkward. That is, up to now. After we saw Assud promising destruction, the lighting changed, the camera returned to Brooker’s face, and the audience laughed and applauded.
“I don’t know that you should clap that!” he exclaimed, prompting another round of happy laughter. “That was like a scene from Oppressed Populations Do The Craziest Things.” And so it was. I think there is a bit of Iger’s helplessness in that remark, but if that is true, then there is also a bit of the Palestinian Tomorrow’s Pioneers‘ pop culture adaptability in the canned British audience. Clapping and roaring is what you do at the end of a clip on a comedy show, and cartoony animal people are what you get on the stage of a children’s programme.
It’s a moment that perfectly fits postmodern ideology: We know it’s wrong, we say it’s wrong, we laugh at its wrongness, and those three things make the stage on which the ideology continues unperturbed. And of course the moment is utterly harmless — not deceivingly harmless but truly, completely harmless, precisely because not even our ideas about harm interfere with the ongoing presentation and celebration of these cartoons. They’re autonomous.
I don’t mean to say we’re not in control. Nobody is aiding or abetting anyone by applauding, and nobody is helplessly being programmed to seek ‘martyrdom’. It would be much too cheap to turn this into a warning against popular consumer culture encroaching on our political beliefs. Nothing encroaches, there is preciously little to encroach upon in the first place, and the whole point is that political beliefs are suspended with regards to the cartoon characters’ travels. I am the last person to believe that we are anything less than free in the face of such media phenomena’s autonomy. But that’s exactly why they remain autonomous. We’re in control, but this stuff isn’t under control.
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