Through the looking glass
Feb. 6th, 2006 04:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusDoll Dress last night (the Gothic Lolita club in Osaka where I played my first concert of 2006, previewing lots of new material) turned out to be rather extraordinary. A dedicated group of devotees had turned a bar, clothes and antiques shop into a sort of cosplay den where the Mad Hatter's tea party from "Alice In Wonderland" was replayed around a table heaving with strawberries and cakes. Performers (me and a band called Harukiya, who combined their intriguing music for deranged dormice with a blindfold tea tasting test) were totally upstaged by the audience, who posed in crinoline Victoriana for the photographer loungeing on a sofa, their postures increasingly erotic. (I'm told these sessions often end in nudity, which seems like a strange and yet apt development for people who invest so much in dressing up.)
Perverse eroticism was also the theme of two excellent films directed by Gabriel "Coco" Fumitsuki, who likes Rothmans Royals, Vivienne Westwood, Shiina Ringo, Bjork and YMO, Bach, Satie, Faure and Ravel (not exactly Goth tastes), and entitles portfolios of teenage girls on her website "pedophilia". (It isn't: all the girls are over 17.) In the first film a Japanese Alice plays chess with a boy dressed up as a schoolgirl, but ends up lying dead on the grass with blood trickling from her mouth (the Cheshire Cat walks away callously). In the second, a kimono girl with bobbed hair is tied up then stabbed in the tummy by another girl. Instead of dying, though, she dribbles clear fluid from her mouth into the other girl's mouth. The ambience is one of aestheticized, eroticized menace, the kind often encountered in the world of Hajime Sawatari, Kuniyoshi Kaneko, Yotsuya Simon, and Hiroko Igeta (who made the Hans Bellmer-esque doll in the photo above).
The MC, in Beijing Opera make-up and a vast yellow afro wig, was an awesome baroque Venetian figure. Coco, the film director, carried an air of powerfully erotic self-sufficiency wherever she went. A photographer in a tiny top hat and zigzag skirt looked amazing. Her partner, in bondage gear, didn't. The men, just like the performers, were upstaged at Doll Dress. Many of them were dressed as women, but looked like second-rate drag queens or Visual-Kei stars. Sure, both genders were faking it, flouncing around like precocious, spoilt Victorian children, but the women were faking it better. In a sharp reversal of the rules of the world outside, at Doll Dress testosterone made you a loser and oestrogen a winner. Through the looking glass indeed.
I'm still pondering what this style means. Obviously I've dabbled in it (I wrote a song about Kaneko, for instance) myself. Friends like Reika and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lord_whimsy seem to understand its impulses too. Is there some connection with the Aristasians? And if so, what does their link with white supremacy mean? And Mishima, never far from proceedings like this, wasn't he a fascist? And David Bowie...
Perhaps closer to these troubling things than it is to Goth style, Gothic Lolita seems to embrace flamboyance and a kind of florid formality as the pinnacle of civilisation. A poisonous, erotic sensuality replaces Goth's death cult. Instead of despair there's an elegant inhibition. And of course Alice, lost in a very Freudian wonderland.
Perverse eroticism was also the theme of two excellent films directed by Gabriel "Coco" Fumitsuki, who likes Rothmans Royals, Vivienne Westwood, Shiina Ringo, Bjork and YMO, Bach, Satie, Faure and Ravel (not exactly Goth tastes), and entitles portfolios of teenage girls on her website "pedophilia". (It isn't: all the girls are over 17.) In the first film a Japanese Alice plays chess with a boy dressed up as a schoolgirl, but ends up lying dead on the grass with blood trickling from her mouth (the Cheshire Cat walks away callously). In the second, a kimono girl with bobbed hair is tied up then stabbed in the tummy by another girl. Instead of dying, though, she dribbles clear fluid from her mouth into the other girl's mouth. The ambience is one of aestheticized, eroticized menace, the kind often encountered in the world of Hajime Sawatari, Kuniyoshi Kaneko, Yotsuya Simon, and Hiroko Igeta (who made the Hans Bellmer-esque doll in the photo above).
The MC, in Beijing Opera make-up and a vast yellow afro wig, was an awesome baroque Venetian figure. Coco, the film director, carried an air of powerfully erotic self-sufficiency wherever she went. A photographer in a tiny top hat and zigzag skirt looked amazing. Her partner, in bondage gear, didn't. The men, just like the performers, were upstaged at Doll Dress. Many of them were dressed as women, but looked like second-rate drag queens or Visual-Kei stars. Sure, both genders were faking it, flouncing around like precocious, spoilt Victorian children, but the women were faking it better. In a sharp reversal of the rules of the world outside, at Doll Dress testosterone made you a loser and oestrogen a winner. Through the looking glass indeed.
I'm still pondering what this style means. Obviously I've dabbled in it (I wrote a song about Kaneko, for instance) myself. Friends like Reika and
lord_whimsy seem to understand its impulses too. Is there some connection with the Aristasians? And if so, what does their link with white supremacy mean? And Mishima, never far from proceedings like this, wasn't he a fascist? And David Bowie...Perhaps closer to these troubling things than it is to Goth style, Gothic Lolita seems to embrace flamboyance and a kind of florid formality as the pinnacle of civilisation. A poisonous, erotic sensuality replaces Goth's death cult. Instead of despair there's an elegant inhibition. And of course Alice, lost in a very Freudian wonderland.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 08:19 am (UTC)And don't you think that Western culture would be healthier if it came to terms with death as a celebration, as in the Mexican Day of the Dead, rather than dealing with it as a hush-hush affair behind the closed and clinical doors of medical science?
For my money, and this would apply to Gothic Lolita too, the saddest thing about traditional, lace- and velvet-wearing gothic subculture is the upward-mobility-ness of aping the aristocrats, turning a supposed exercise in subversion into one of disguised conservatism. And I say that as a Victoriana-phile... then again, I suppose there's not much difference between the lower strata of society from era to era, at least in terms of outward appearance.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 08:22 am (UTC)For me, Goth comes from an amalgam of Romanticism (via horror films) and punk rock (Siouxsie and the Banshees, etc).
Gothic Lolita is coming more from "Alice in Wonderland" (filtered through Freud, Hans Bellmer, etc) and Visual Kei.
Goth is American, Gothic Lolita is Japanese.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 08:24 am (UTC)Not at all. I think it already celebrates death way too much. There's the glee of Bush declaring himself "a war president", for instance.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 08:27 am (UTC)I'd say it glorifies war and violence, but the war we think of today is a sanitised war in which the 'death' aspect is edited out. Think of US media control over images of dead soldiers' coffins for example. And how often do we see dead Iraqis?
They're selling a myth of power and glory which has nothing to do with the messy reality of death, and they'll try and keep it that way as much as possible.
In this sense, that same sanitisation is going on on the macro scale.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 08:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 09:47 am (UTC)A lot of the goths I know favour the Victorian/Edwardian goth style and others are a more fetish style.
There are also the cybergoths, who are more like ravers with their colourful hair and dress (a la Cyberdog).
The perception of goth is different in different countries, thus the Marilyn Manson "goth" in the US, the "Siouxsie"/Victorian/cyber goth in the UK and the German goth as seen at Liepzig festival.
american gothic
Date: 2006-02-06 10:18 am (UTC)up on to a screen and asked, "What's wrong with this picture?"
His postulation was that 'gothic' is not American really, that the very title 'American Gothic' is used deliberately as a kind of oxymoron, that what Gothic means in America is the European doppleganger that the settlers could not quite kill (apparently there's a Herman Melville story along these lines). Gothicism in America is the shadow that cannot quite be exorcised. In Britain, it's a kind of homely return to an older sense of identity.
The Castle of Otranto, usually cited as the first Gothic novel, if you read it, is not really very Gothic. It has been described as more rococo (perhaps somewhat like the gosurori dresses). It does deal with the horrors of atavism, but it is also a celebration of the imaginative freedoms to be found in the pre-Enlightenment barbarous age.
Re: american gothic
Date: 2006-02-06 10:19 am (UTC)Re: american gothic
Date: 2006-02-06 11:16 am (UTC)