by Evan Burger, Senior Editor
twitter: @evan_burger
While the commentariat was busy debating the politics of Lincoln, Django Unchained, and Les Miserables, a surprisingly radical film slipped under the critical radar in the form of Pitch Perfect, a comedy set in the world of collegiate a cappella. Ten months after the eviction of Zuccotti Park ended the glory days of the Occupy movement, and only weeks after Christopher Nolan tied the language of the 99% to the Terror, this light-hearted flick continues the debate over the possibility of more democratic kinds of political organization.
To be sure, classifying Pitch Perfect as even a middlebrow film is quite a stretch. The plotting follows standard Hollywood formulae; the concept is borrowed directly from the most earnest series on television right now, Glee; and the acting, aside from Rebel Wilson’s performance, is solidly forgettable.
And these aesthetic critiques don’t even address the reactionary sexual politics at play in the film. There’s slut-shaming galore, and a deeply problematic handling of the only queer character. Say what you will about the politics of Glee, but at least it doesn’t portray lesbians as constantly leering at other women, creating tension in an otherwise pristinely hetero group.
But despite its flaws, this film adds up to something much more than conservative kitsch. Rather, if we strip the plot down to its schematic elements, we find it to be a re-telling of the ancient story of old, broken forms of self-organization that must be replaced — the story, that is, of revolution.
The narrative is structured around two warring a cappella groups, the all-female Barden Bellas and the male Treblemakers. If we read each group as a polis, a group of citizens who must organize themselves, then at the outset both groups solidly fit the classical mold of tyranny: each is run by an iron-fisted senior and his or her trusted lackey. For the Treblemakers, this model works excellently, as the narcissistic Bumper leads the group to victory after victory. The Bellas aren’t so well-off: Aubrey refuses to innovate beyond the tired songs that the Bellas have always performed, and the group consequently suffers in competitions.
Dramatic tension appears with the protagonist Beca, who has a winning strategy for the Bellas, but cannot implement it under the conservative leadership of Aubrey. Those of us on the Left are familiar with Beca’s dilemma: a better way of organizing society is so obvious, but those who benefit from the old power structures block its implementation at every turn.
And the equally hierarchical organization of the Treblemakers turns out to be just as problematic, as Bumper abandons the group to “sing backup for John Mayer.” A cult of personality may work as long as the figure of the dear leader holds things together, but falls apart with the disappearance of that keystone.
As vertical organization lands both the Bellas and the Treblemakers in crisis, a young new leader steps up in each to offer a solution. Aubrey cedes power to Beca (with the plaintive question, “What do we do, Beca?”), and Jesse, Beca’s counterpart in the Treblemakers, assumes leadership of his group.
Both offer a new path for their respective groups: a move away from vertical hierarchy to a more democratic mode of organization. Jesse invites the character who embodies those left out by Bumper’s exclusionary rule back into the Treblemakers, and each group’s performance in the climactic finale includes more members of the group than ever before, rather than relying on one or two stars. In a Hollywood ending complete with a kiss, the revolution is tidily completed: democracy replaces tyranny, and everyone lives happily ever after.
The first method has proved immensely successful (see: the Frankfurt School). But as I’ve insisted elsewhere, building on what critical resources are available to you, no matter how meager, is always a better strategy than trying to construct a politics ex nihilo. By all means, we must condemn the ways this film perpetuates oppression based on gender and sexuality — but this critique should be paired with an honest assessment of the positive political message latent in the story.
A paean to leaderless-ness and consensus-based decision-making this is not. But as critics on the Left, we have two options when faced with a cultural product such as Pitch Perfect (or the Harlem Shake): we could lazily write it off as mindless trash that distracts from political engagement, yet another mass-produced artifact of the capitalist machine. Or we can undertake the more difficult task of cultivating its implicit political possibilities, drawing out its latent critiques of the very order that produced it.
Mass art isn’t going anywhere. And we, as leftists, can respond to this fact with either standard elitist scorn (enjoyable but pragmatically worse than useless) — or with a willingness to see the radical political potential in these cultural artifacts. I choose the latter.
