“I Don’t Wanna Talk Anymore”: On the Queer Nonutility of “Telephone Remake”

Abstract

“I Don’t Wanna Talk Anymore”On the Queer Nonutility of “Telephone Remake” Robert Alford (bio) Videos of members of the American armed forces that turn viral online tend to fall into one of two groups: those that show soldiers behaving violently, abusing power, and shooting or blowing up objects; and those that picture soldiers dancing. In dividing such videos into two broad categories I am not trying to suggest that they are mutually exclusive, only that the spectatorial pleasures to be found in watching them (that in turn propel them to viral status) tend to be different, and in turn engender different effects within the discourse that contextualizes them. Videos of soldiers behaving badly (for example, the video of Marines urinating on Afghan corpses that leaked in early 2012) are always read against morally ideal elaborations of a soldier and his or her duties, and they tend to evoke fascination, horror, and disgust before those pictured are publicly denounced as examples of moral degeneracy by American authorities, citizens, and fellow soldiers (Bowley and Rosenberg). The response to videos of soldiers dancing is more complicated, and consistently involves positive affective experience such as happiness and glee in addition to more negative reactions such as anger. In turn, the ideological stakes that viewers of these videos elaborate for them are varied but are nonetheless in relation to the figure of the soldier and the government for which he or she acts. While many videos of dancing soldiers more or less reaffirm the ideological agenda of the U.S. government, a few remain ambiguous enough that viewers interpret them as critiques of prevailing power structures and hostile discursive regimes. One viral video that features dancing soldiers that fits into the latter category—“Telephone Remake” from 2010—provides a case study for the destabilizing effects that linguistically ambiguous content online might render within discourse. Uploaded to YouTube by Sergeant Aaron [End Page 113] Melcher with the message, “Prepare yourself for a fantastical journey,” “Telephone Remake” pictures Melcher and some fellow soldiers (rather clumsily) recreating Lady Gaga’s popular music video for the song “Telephone.” Beyond this basic premise, however, there is little that provides meaning or context for the viewer. Blogs first interpreted the video as a subversive expression of queer identity in the face of the military’s policing of explicit articulations of homosexuality before the video was normalized in print and on television as a morale booster for troops on duty and Americans at home. “Telephone Remake” then became part of a constellation of forces that animated legal change and established LGBT soldiers as vital to the armed forces, even though the video remains othered within this revised identitarian discourse. The ambiguous identities and motivations of those who made the video propelled it to notoriety; despite statements from Melcher and the video’s other makers that they are heterosexual, certain formal qualities of the video (or, rather, the preponderance of formal qualities over speech) sowed collective doubt in the minds of viewers about the legitimacy of these (or any) statements about identity. To be clear, the video’s rise to popularity and notoriety had nothing to do with the intent of the videos makers but rather the ways that the nonhuman formal elements of the video sustained oppositional readings. “Telephone Remake” crystallizes the networked, viral potentials of what has been described as “the figural” to disrupt discourse by confusing processes of looking and reading. Articulated briefly, the figural is that which both conveys and resists meaning (for example, the qualities of a typeface that mean nothing, even as they function to transmit linguistic information). The figural always carries with it the potential to blur looking and reading, whereby formal information predominates reception at the expense of linguistic information. What is important about this process is that it opens a space within discourse wherein ideological assumptions might be both uncloaked and negotiated. This potential of the figural to disrupt hegemonic forms of power through the conflation of looking and reading is what has animated both Jean-François Lyotard and D. N. Rodowick—the latter writing specifically about its implications for new media—to explore the meeting of form with meaning that...