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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   37620 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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Is Dylan Mulvaney the Trans Andy Kaufmann?

Watching the Dylan Mulvaney spectacle play out has left me with an odd feeling that I’ve struggled to quite put a finger on, with Mulvaney causing me to have something like an uncanny valley reaction to his transition and demeanor. I don’t mean this to say that Mulvaney looks almost female, but not quite, I mean that Mulvaney gives me the impression of someone that isn’t sincere about transitioning, but has put enough effort into it that I’m not exactly sure what’s going on and what to make of this person. In light of the recent Bud Light debacle I’ve finally settled on an explanation that makes more sense to me - Mulvaney is a modern Andy Kaufman, playing the part of a trans person well enough to convince some people, while others are in on the joke, and all of them contribute to Mulvaney’s accrual of fame and cash.

Who was Andy Kaufman? I think the Wiki summary is better than anything I’ll write up:

During this time, he continued to tour comedy clubs and theaters in a series of unique performance art/comedy shows, sometimes appearing as himself and sometimes as obnoxiously rude lounge singer Tony Clifton. He was also a frequent guest on sketch comedy and late-night talk shows, particularly Late Night with David Letterman.[6] In 1982, Kaufman brought his professional wrestling villain act to Letterman's show by way of a staged encounter with Jerry "The King" Lawler of the Continental Wrestling Association. The fact that the altercation was planned was not publicly disclosed for over a decade.

Kaufman died of lung cancer on May 16, 1984, at the age of 35.[7] As pranks and elaborate ruses were major elements of his career, persistent rumors have circulated that Kaufman faked his own death as a grand hoax.[6][8] He continues to be respected for the variety of his characters, his uniquely counterintuitive approach to comedy, and his willingness to provoke negative and confused reactions from audiences.[6][9]

Comedian Richard Lewis in A Comedy Salute to Andy Kaufman said of him: "No one has ever done what Andy did, and did it as well, and no one will ever. Because he did it first. So did Buster Keaton, so did Andy."[96] Carl Reiner recalled his distinction in the comedy world:

Did Andy influence comedy? No. Because nobody's doing what he did. Jim Carrey was influenced—not to do what Andy did, but to follow his own drummer. I think Andy did that for a lot of people. Follow your own drumbeat. You didn't have to go up there and say 'take my wife, please.'[97] You could do anything that struck you as entertaining. It gave people freedom to be themselves.[98]

Reiner also said of Kaufman: "Nobody can see past the edges, where the character begins and he ends."[99]

Kaufman made people laugh, get angry with him, and even physically attack him by playacting at different roles so successfully than people couldn’t tell where the sincere Kaufman stopped and the characters began. When I watch Dylan Mulvaney advertise native-scented deodorant, I don’t see someone that’s genuinely trying to be a woman. I see someone that’s clowning the concept, mocking women, mocking trans people, and exploiting the clicks for fun and profit.

I wasn’t around for Kaufman, so this comparison is likely imperfect. Nonetheless, watching people react to what sure looks to me like a running joke as though it’s perfectly sincere has been entirely surreal. I see people on the pro-trans side treating Mulvaney as sincere. If I’m right and this is a running joke, Joe Biden sure didn’t get the word. My inclination has been to chalk this up to people becoming sufficiently accustomed to never question claims from trans people that playing along with Dylan Mulvaney is no different than the rest of it, and even if they have doubts, they’re surely not going to look at Dylan and saying, “oh, come the fuck on”. So even though this was weird, it wasn’t until the Bud Light thing that it began to really seem hyperreal to me.

Here, watch this 35 second reaction video from Kid Rock. What’s going on here? Is Kid Rock sincerely pissed off at Bud Light, so pissed off that the only way to express it is with a burst of automatic weapons fire supplemented by some covering fire from a shotgun-wielding buddy? Is he basically sincere in his reaction, but strongly exaggerating the reaction because it’s funny? Is he ambivalent, but doing it for the clicks and lols? Is he part of the Bud Light advertising campaign, just driving the product into people’s mindspace? Does he agree with me that the whole thing is a big joke and he’s just rolling with his own improv? I don’t know and I don’t even know how I would know.

Vox reports that people have reacted in real life:

Don, a liquor store owner in Arkansas who requested to remain anonymous so he “doesn’t get caught up in the wokeness,” told me he’s seen a 20-25 percent dip in Bud Light sales since the controversy hit, with his admittedly small sample size of shoppers seemingly opting for Miller Lite and Coors Light instead. However, he doesn’t expect the backlash to stick. “A lot of people are talking about it, fired up about it, they’re never drinking Bud Light again, yada yada yada, but they’ll be drinking them in a month, as soon as the news cycle quits,” he said.

Well, what are those people thinking? Are they genuinely pissed, but not so pissed as to permanently give up a product that seems completely fungible with other light beers? How about Ben Shapiro:

The post started to pick up steam in conservative circles relatively quickly. Right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro decried the collaboration on his show, saying, “Well, folks, our culture has now decided men are women and women are men and you must be forced to consume products that say so.” Shapiro appears not to be much of a Bud Light fan himself, so he probably doesn’t have much to boycott. “I understand Bud Light is piss water masquerading as beer,” he said, “so I guess that, you know, it’s sort of trans beer.”

Well, I’m glad he at least kept the on-brand smugness. In fact, no one seems to be missing out on their normal branding, which lends itself to the hyperreal experience. In keeping with that, I will smugly note that I don’t drink that shit anyway and I’ll be cracking an IPA from a real industry underdog - Lagunitas(tm), a tiny subsidiary of a little-known international parent company. Thank God that I’m not getting taken in by all this hyperreal marketing.

Same as the performance-based social media backlash against Nike regarding the Kaepernick ads. Or against Starbucks and Disney. It will pass in a few weeks, as it always does. Social media is the perfect medium for expressing outrage. Conservatives may try to boycott but the hard part is sustaining it.

I too doubt any sort of boycott would have any measurable negative impact, much less a meaningful one, to these companies, but I also wonder how well this sort of marketing will work out for Anheuser-Busch. The types of people that I know who would be attracted to a brand by Mulvaney's endorsement are also the types of people who wouldn't be caught dead drinking Bud Light (though something by a brewery owned by Anheuser-Busch is another question), and I can't imagine this allowing them to overcome that distaste. But the people I know are obviously not representative of such a population, so maybe there are a lot of people who would be converted to drinking Bud Light that Anheuser-Busch's marketing identified. The effects of marketing is well known to be illegible even by marketers, so perhaps it's just a more general latching-onto-the-bandwagon thing. Actually, now that I think about it, it could also be an investment in the future: as current preteens and teenagers - a population I believe is more skewed than the rest of the population towards being positively influenced by Mulvaney's endorsement - age up into drinking age, their mental association between Mulvaney and Bud Light, now reinforced for multiple of their most impressionable years - could push them more towards that beer.

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