The response to the ad among media and cultural critics as well as parody-makers on the web and TV has been significant, but not much discussion of her statement about witchcraft beyond scoffing and sputtering. Some, like Giant Magazine’s Jay Smooth, have suggested that witchcraft is beside the point and that the real problem of the ad is her claim that she is not just like you, but that she is you. Certainly, O’Donnell’s I-am-the-Walrus-esque “I’m you” merits attention, but dismissing O’Donnell’s response to discussions of her dabblings and her decision to do so in her debut spot means passing up an opportunity to understand how she constructs herself as a righteous outsider–a key source of appeal for her as a Tea Party candidate.

Christine O’Donnell – “I’m You” – YouTube

O’Donnell’s actual involvement in any kind of organized witchcraft was likely only cursory (and had little to nothing to do with Wicca, Paganism, or other related spiritual practices), but her opening line in this ad is no mere toss off. When Christine O’Donnell declares, “I’m not a witch,” she is not only attempting to allay concerns about the extent of her experimenting, but also invoking the figure of the witch and its various connotations. These connotations include the image of an unruly woman, the long history of using accusations of witchcraft to marginalize people–quite often women–who do not conform to social norms and the more metaphorical concept of the political witch hunt.

In the ad, O’Donnell is careful to make sure that current or potential supporters are convinced of her current state of faith as a devout Catholic. The tone of the ad is decidedly restrained and mature, with its slow piano track and soft focus close up of O’Donnell, who appears dressed in a modest black suit and pearls, with her hair straightened, looking directly into the camera. This stands in contrast to her earlier strategy of responding to questions about her experience with witchcraft by heartily laughing it off as a lark.  In a sense, then, O’Donnell is chastened as a result of her associations with witchcraft.

But what O’Donnell is responding to is not an organized witch hunt, nor is it an accusation being leveled against her by Democrats or her opponent. Moreover, she is not being persecuted in a particularly menacing way by those who seem fascinated by her claims (mocked and dismissed in some troubling ways, yes, but not menaced pitchfork-and-torch style).  O’Donnell seems fundamentally aware of the absurdity of her situation too, delivering her first line with a smile. Further, she makes the negative attention work to her advantage by positioning herself first of all as someone who sounds more like they are responding to accusations of witchcraft than one who brought it up themselves and on TV, no less.  She moves from “I’m not a witch” to ” I’m nothing you’ve heard” and this move allows her to not only deny the allegations but also to assume the moral high ground with respect to those who dismiss her because of her supposed spiritual experimentation. The second sentence of the ad is key here as it allows and even encourages the audience to reject critiques of other positions she has taken such as her earlier anti-masturbation activism in an MTV documentary or her stance on theories of evolution. Perhaps most importantly, though, by suggesting that all this talk about witchcraft is something “you’ve heard” rather than something she said frames discussions of the Maher  and MTV clips as hearsay or gossip despite the fact that they feature her own words.

We cannot say with any certainty if audiences are thinking about O’Donnell’s word craft or if any of this will change voters’ minds in Delaware. O’Donnell, who was already down by about 15 points in polls before the Maher clip resurfaced, now appears to be almost 20 points behind Democrat Chris Coons according to a more recent University of Delaware poll.

Even if she doesn’t go to Washington, though, Christine O’Donnell’s primary victory suggests some very real shifts taking place in the American political landscape and despite the improbability (but not impossibility) of O’Donnell winning the seat formerly held by Vice President Joe Biden, she continues to hold the attention of news sources like CNN (which will be airing the public debate between O’Donnell and Coons tonight) and she will likely remain a very public and possibly very influential figure after next month’s election.

While I’m very much in favor of focusing attention on candidates’ current ideas and policy positions, I am troubled by the way that public fascination with O’Donnell’s ten-year old admission to an even earlier and wholly superficial-sounding encounter with the Occult now affords her a potentially potent form of credibility as one who was mocked and dismissed through an association with witchcraft.

The finale follows Grace to Mexico as she struggles to deal with accidentally killing a little girl by pretending to be her, making like Edna Pontellier after learning that Neely finally succumbed to her meth addiction despite Grace’s (and Earl’s) interventions, emerging from the ocean ready to turn her life over to God, and ultimately making good on that deal by sacrificing her life in order to stop evil.

The series not only ties up loose ends, but comes full circle in the final episodes.  This is most evident when Grace accidentally runs over a little girl, Esperanza, who runs into the street. This tragedy sets the final plot arcs in motion and clearly brings the narrative back to the accident that initially introduced Grace to her “last chance” angel, Earl. While the show repeatedly tells us that Esperanza’s death was truly a tragic accident, the initial incident was the result of Grace’s reckless drunk driving and actually staged by Earl/God in order to get her attention and set her on a path of righteousness.

In the pilot Earl tells Grace in no uncertain terms that she is bound for Hell if she does not change her ways. The show’s early episodes suggested that the series would ultimately be about reforming Grace’s behavior, kind of like a makeover for her soul. As the series progressed however, its tone changed. Though Grace stopped driving drunk after the pilot and eventually stopped (knowingly) sleeping with married men (at the behest of her best friend, Rhetta [Laura SanGiacomo], not God or Earl), Grace did not really change who she was or how she behaved.

Over time, Saving Grace developed a narrative world in which God is not just involved in a “love the sinner, hate the sin” kind of relationship with humans and with a woman in particular, but actually values intemperances and inconsistencies. This shift in narrative tone is what makes Grace an interesting story and it also makes Grace’s later accident all the more gut-wrenching—it’s not about tests and punishments, about guilt and innocence. We are reminded of how Grace the character and Grace the series have grown and changed.

Unfortunately, in the show’s final moments, it returns to the kind of crude renderings of divinity and morality that hampered the show’s beginnings. What might be most disappointing (aside from using “Wherever You Will Go” by The Calling as the music for the final shots) is the fact that evil becomes personified and thus simplified. Hut Flanders (Gordon MacDonald), who appeared as a mysterious and vaguely menacing figure at the start of the fourth season, returns and reveals himself to be, not the Devil per se , but evil personified. In one of the last scenes of the show, he claims responsibility for many of the particular incidents of evil or tragedy that the series addressed, including sending Esperanza into the street, the rape and torture of women (including Grace), and for the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed her sister. It is his threat to commit a similar act of terror if Grace decides to let him walk away that leads Grace to flick her cigar into the pile of explosives he’s placed in the back of her truck, destroying Hut’s stock-pile, possibly destroying him, and killing herself.

Going into the series finale, my assessment of Saving Grace was that it mattered because it was a story about issues of faith that did not tell us that everything is going to be alright, but neither did it allow us to indulge in apocalyptic fantasies. Further,  throughout its run, the show presented a world in which an unruly woman (albeit a predictably straight and visibly white woman) could be valued without needing redemption or containment via institutions of marriage or motherhood (though she was not immune to their pull). Saving Grace added new dimensions to popular discussions of faith and morality.  By refusing a happy or even reassuring ending, I think Saving Grace’s finale stayed true to the series’ brand of realism and defied expectations, but it also returned to some of the series initial shortcomings. Grace’s unflinching self-sacrifice in the final scenes of the show was heroic and in keeping with her character, but it is too bad that we can’t yet seem to imagine a conclusion to Grace’s story that maintains both her place in this world and her integrity as a character. That said, the way the show closed Grace’s story does not diminish the narrative possibilities the series may have opened up.

The profile picture for the Doppelgänger Week Facebook page

If you use Facebook, chances are you saw the Celebrity Doppelgänger meme dominate your news feed a couple of weeks ago. Perhaps you participated in the exercise yourself using a celebrity you’ve been told you resemble, consulting myheritage.com’s celebrity look-a-like generator, or submitting your picture to the Facebook fan page for Doppelgänger Week and asking others for suggestions.  After all, it can be fun to imagine ourselves as celebrities with their glamorous lives and there is something appealing about an opportunity to see how other people see us (I’ll leave it to others to discuss why such things may or may not be fun).  One anonymous poster to a college newspaper’s website even asserted that the Facebook doppelgängers “can actually tell you something about a person – their personality, what traits they admire in others, and whether they consider themselves significantly more attractive than they really are”.  Yet, for many people it is just as fun to play with the meme, choosing, for example, self-deprecating pictures, non-humans, or celebrities of the opposite gender.

While no one in my own circles appeared to be taking the meme too seriously (and I suspect this stance was common), over the course of the week questions began to emerge about who was getting to have the fun and who was really able to play the doppelgänger game. A friend summed up one answer to that question  with a status update which noted that, “given the current demographic distribution of celebrities, it is a lot easier for white folks to pick their doppelgängers.” I think she’s right. Even with US celebrity culture’s narrow definitions of beauty and attractiveness (even Megan Fox needs a stand-in these days), there is simply a much wider range of white faces to choose from than of other racial and ethnic groups. The flurry of responses to my friend’s status update generally affirmed her statement, noting how frustrating it was to have perhaps one celebrity who shares your racial and/or ethnic identity  that would be recognizable to friends only familiar with US celebrity culture (it would be great to hear from folks about the meme beyond the US context).

I’m certainly not the first person to notice or report on these discussions. Sepia Mutiny observed similar frustrations and has already offered a really nice analysis of Facebook users’ discussions of the meme including debates about the fluidity and meaning of identity. Over at Racialicious there is an open comment thread on the topic of the meme that has garnered dozens of comments since being started on February 9.

Vanity Fair's March 2010 Cover

Public conversations about race and ethnicity in  US celebrity culture haven’t been focused solely on the doppelganger meme in the past few weeks, though. In her post on this site, Mary Beltran pointed out how while Vanity Fair‘s piece on up-and-coming starlets in the February issue included actresses of mixed race and ethnicity, they physically separated them from white actresses suggesting an ethnically divided star system. In the popular press, Vanity Fair‘s March 2010 cover of its “New Hollywood” issue has received criticism for overlooking breakout actresses of color (there were no repeats from the February piece). One piece on Yahoo’s Shine page puzzled over how such a cover and story could ignore the successful (and profitable) performances given by Gabourey Sidibe, Zoe Saldana, and Freida Pinto. That one article received over 18,000 comments.  Whereas the Facebook comment threads I’ve seen tend to be populated mostly by people who agree with a poster’s critique of the doppelganger meme, comments about the Vanity Fair cover were dominated (not entirely surprisingly) by the opinion that these omissions did not matter and certainly did not reflect any racism or ethnocentrism in Hollywood or anywhere else in US culture.

At a moment when political figures (however fringe-y) such as Tom Tancredo are trotting out Jim Crow policy models like literacy and civics requirements for voting on the national stage, Vanity Fair coverage and Facebook memes may not seem like particularly significant sites of discourse about race and ethnicity in US culture. But phenomena like Doppelgänger Week and the responses to it illustrate the ways that exclusion occurs and privilege is shored up through the most banal and ostensibly non-political cultural practices. Moreover, the fact that when these absences are pointed out so many people are quickly moved to justify them not only reconfirms that we are not living in a society where race no longer matters, but that in fact we  live in a society where supposed frivolities like popular magazines and social networking sites are spaces where constructions of identity are perhaps the most deeply resistant to meaningful change. What discussions surrounding the Facebook meme and the Vanity Fair cover can tell us is that while no one is suggesting that media visibility (via celebrity status or otherwise) is the key to resolving issues of racism and ethnocentrism, the absence of visibility  is still still noticeable and significant. Both this lack of visibility and the notion of race and ethnicity as visible (which I know I haven’t touched on here) demand our attention as scholars and teachers.

Will viewers of the talk show necessarily flock to OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network, the cable channel she’s preparing to launch with Discovery?

How is OWN (which was announced in 2008 and was originally supposed to launch this year) different from Oprah’s earlier foray into cable, Oxygen?

Assuming audiences do take to OWN, will they desert network TV during the afternoon to do so?

In the context of Oprah’s decision to end The Oprah Winfrey Show, what do we make of her even more recently announced deal with HBO to produce Erin Cressida Wilson’s (of Secretary fame) new pilot about a woman who leaves her husband and children to embark on some sort of sexual vision quest?

Aside from her multi-media production deals, will Oprah be able to promote books, films, and personalities as effectively as she has in the past without a daily show on a broadcast network?

While Oprah is clearly uninterested in retiring, her daily presence on the TV screen will likely be a substantial loss to her sizable audience of regular viewers. While Oprah is not a religion, she is, in many ways, a spiritual figure who has built a relationship with audiences around rituals. What does is mean for her to abandon what the New York Times knowingly called her “pulpit”?

First, three for Twilight (So much good analysis and/or parody! How could I resist?): 1. Lindsay H. Garrison’s post in anticipation of New Moon; 2. College Humor’s parody trailer, Twilight: Three Wolf Moon featuring the excellent Aubrey Plaza of Parks and Recreation; and 3. University of Missouri profs Melissa Click and Jennifer Stevens Aubrey discussing the series on the CBC.

4. Gen X-ers confront their own mortality as they mourn the passing of the host of MTV’s Remote Control, Ken Ober.  Fellow comic and writer, Jeff Kahn offers a tribute at HuffPo.

5. Jezebel tackles a a personal pet peeve of mine: the ubiquitous Kay Jewelers ads which run until right around the return of Daylight Savings.

6. While technically posted last week, Sarah Haskins adds another much-needed critique of advertising with her take on the recent spate of Broadview Security (formerly Brinks) ads that shamelessly traffic in the notion that a woman alone is a woman in peril:

7. Variety reports some shake-up in the trades with Nielsen’s plan to sell properties including Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter.

8. In video game news, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 broke sales records this week.

9. Over at salon.com, Alexander Zaitchik looks to the discussion boards of white supremacist site, Stormfront to see how one segment of Glenn Beck’s audience makes sense of him.

10. Lastly, since it’s almost (US) Thanksgiving, here’s a link to a holiday-themed spot of Kenneth the Web Page.

A Review of R. Kelly’s Ladies Make Some Noise Tour

Milwaukee Theater, Milwaukee, WI, November 15, 2009

By Megan Biddinger and Christopher Cwynar

R. Kelly has been in the news of late for his alleged indiscretions, his outlandish serialized ‘Hip Hopera’ Trapped in the Closet, and the baroque ‘sexaphors’ that drive his self-reflexive club jams. However, to roughly paraphrase Peter Lehmann, there are many R. Kellys. This was apparent last Sunday night as the more salacious Kelly took a backseat to an earnest and grateful Kelly. To be sure, Kelly interpellated the ladies in the audience as objects of desire, but his sex jams were only part of a setlist that offered a full retrospective of his seventeen-year career. Kelly exhorted the ladies to make some noise at regular intervals, but he also invited his most dedicated fans to share his appreciation for the opportunity to continue making music.

If the show was a bit restrained, it certainly did not want for energy or involvement. A savvy performer, Kelly understands that the performance of fandom is a vital part of a large-scale R&B/Soul show. Kelly repeatedly asked the audience to scream and to sing choruses, and almost as often, he would point the mic towards the crowd and the fans would lustily sing entire verses back to him. These extended exchanges effectively turned the theater into a collaborative space, allowing fans to participate in the spectacle they had come to witness, and to collectively embody the icon they had come to worship.

This was exemplified by Kelly’s performance of ‘Contagious’, his duet with Ronald Isley. Here, Kelly took Isley’s lines and let the crowd take his own verse. This move encouraged concertgoers to become Kelly, and simultaneously allowed Kelly to adopt the role of Isley, establishing his position within a certain R&B/Soul tradition.

This tradition and Kelly’s rightful place within it comprised the focus of the show’s final segment. After moving through some high-energy medleys, a few entertaining skits (including an operatic shout-out to the ‘little booty girls’ in the audience), and some extended slow jams, the self-proclaimed “King of R&B” moved to establish a serious claim to his throne.

After the Isley collaboration, Kelly offered a videotaped tribute to Michael Jackson, for whom he wrote “You Are Not Alone”. In referring to Jackson’s passing as the loss of “our musical breath”, Kelly alluded to a particular cultural tradition shared by many in the audience. Although some observers might have approached this moment in terms of the similar extra-musical aspects of their careers (i.e. similar legal troubles), Kelly framed it in terms of friendship and community in the context of R&B and Soul music and the significance of those musical traditions to African American culture.

Kelly drove this point home by transitioning to an earnest tribute to Sam Cooke that he dedicated to his late mother, Joanne. Performing “Bring It On Home To Me” and “A Change is Gonna Come”, Kelly showcased his skills as a pop ventriloquist while subtly establishing his position as a keeper of the Soul music flame and heir to the legacy of performers like Cooke, Jackson, and the Isley Brothers.

From there, Kelly unleashed the confetti canons and sent us on our way with a brief Midwestern dance party to “Step in the Name of Love” and “Happy People”. These joyful numbers, steeped in middle-class respectability, underscored the fact that, though Kelly is often portrayed as a menace or a joke in the mainstream media, he is a chameleon who is equal parts comic, loverman, and reverend. Kelly’s longevity is likely a function of his ability to re-configure these elements for a fan base interested in all of the many R. Kellys on display.

Can we get a toot toot?

(beep beep)