There is nothing outside the culture

I find something unsettling in the film «Стиляги» (dir. Valerii Todorovskii), which came out in Russia late last year (the pace of pop culture makes this post seem anachronistic as a result). The same goes for the reviews and comments that I've found online which praise both the film and its eponymous 1950s westernized Soviet hipsters, as if the former were an endorsement of diversity and peaceful coexistence and the latter were rebels against Khrushchev-era Soviet society, typically conceived as a world of always-already crumbling concrete apartment blocks, shabby clothes, and crappy consumer goods.

Part of the problem is with the notion that a subculture of Soviet youths who emulated Western tastes in music and fashion could constitute a resistance movement worthy of respect, especially when it was probably the relaxation of state repression that came with the death of Stalin and the ascent to power of Khruschev in 1953 which permitted the stiliagi to appear in the first place. Somehow this reminds me of the assassination of Tsar Alexsander II - the most progressive and sympathetic of late Russian monarchs, or, perhaps, Gorbachev's attempt to loosen the repressions which were the only thing holding the moribund Soviet Union together by the 1980s. In each case, the forces of dissolution - to whatever extent they can be personified - seem to work against gradual reform and play into the hands of reaction.

But given my limited knowledge of the stiliagi movement, my main concern is with the film's presentation of them and their Soviet reality. The first thing that struck me about the film was its cinematography, or, more precisely, the over-saturated color of nearly every shot. Before I realized that it was a musical (what an intriguing possibility: a politically engaged musical!), the dancing camerawork and the brilliant colors suggested a subversion of stereotyped images: the Soviet 1950s portrayed with such vibrancy and mobility, in the total absence of traditional iconography of police-state oppression, that the past took on the aspect of something more fun than the present. The Soviet communal apartment, rendered in Utopian color, was transfigured into socialism in action. Unfortunately, this totally unexpected and intriguing idea - that Soviet banality could somehow be reconceived as a case study in the forces of small-scale happiness which hide in the dingy corners of daily life, and, more generally, that traditional filmic representations of the past could be subverted to give us a startlingly new image of the past (the actual past does not figure in this at all, of course) - all this hope soon bit the dust, as it became increasingly clear that the only reason for this infusion of light into the Soviet gloaming was the existence of the stiliagi and their sycophantic emulation of American consumption. The brilliance of the communal apartment scenes was, apparently, an side effect: they must never have bothered to change the filters on the camera lenses.

However, it is not fair to say that the film establishes a clean dichotomy between terrible Soviet reality and the Utopian praxis of the stiliagi. The communal apartment is, somehow, the site of kindness and toleration (the acceptance of the stiliaga's illegitimate black baby becomes a "real life" enactment of Grigori Aleksandrov's 1936 patriotic comedy Circus. This is to say that there are no real bad guys in the film, or that those who come closest to being bad guys - the Komsomol group to which the protagonist Mels initially belongs (before being seduced by the stiliagi) is shown, as are the communal apartment dwellers, as true believers in a system which the film does not attempt to discredit explicitly. Its worst trait, evidently, is that its citizens wear drab clothing and don't listen to jazz.

The effect of this is that the stiliagi lose any kind of political engagement. The 1950s world they inhabit is one that is technologically advanced, (relatively) clean (if only because of those damned colors again), functional, and generally free of arbitrary displays of state power. What the stiliagi offer is unrestrained enjoyment (musical and sexual). The entrance ticket is proper attire and Westernization: Mels spends his hard-earned proletarian salary on ridiculous suits and drops the s from his name, becoming an American Mel and forsaking his Soviet identity (Marx Engels Lenin Stalin).

Unfortunately, the ideological conflict between the Komsomol kids and the stiliagi with which the film begins (and which could have led it into a refreshing and novel musical about young people, aesthetics, and political engagement) is obliterated by the burgeoning melodramatic love triangle, in which the leader of the Komsomol and the stiliaga girl vie for Mel's affections. Is this another inane hint that we live in a 'post-ideological' age, and that ideology never really mattered?

The end of the film is striking in light of that idea: as the stiliagi disintegrate - as one, the former leader, gets rejected by Mel after returning from some kind of business trip to America and informing him that stiliagi are a purely Soviet creation, and that no one would be caught dead on Broadway in their clothes, another one gets arrested, and Mel himself surrenders his Komsomol membership, and, by extension, his ability to attend the university - Mel parades down another brilliantly illuminated street and sings, and suddenly, members of all subsequent subcultures appear and join in. The songs were already anachronistic imitations of 1950s American music (Russian musical tastes long seemed to trail those of America by about a decade), but now, the entire historical setting explodes. The concept of subculture combusts with it. In the final analysis, how can a subculture retain its oppositional stance when it becomes self-aware, through exposure to other subcultures (or, by analogy, to the history of subcultures), and is exposed, thereby, as merely a different pattern of consumption? Mel the stiliaga encounters punks, metal fans, wiggers, and all manner of other hipsters, all merged together in an exceedingly modern image of subculture parodying itself, realizing that it is fully integrated into the dominant culture as a commodity ready for consumption, and that the only thing that characterizes an alternative mode of living in our hyper-aware postmodern world is an alternative mode of shopping.

In light of this, I can't decide what stance the film takes to the Komsomol members singing the praises of regimented communal solidarity (conformity).

There is much more to say about this (anthropologically) fascinating film, but that will have to wait.