Word: braderman
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Like many Americans, performance artist Joan Braderman is entranced by popular culture. Her video, "Joan Sees Stars," addresses this national obsession with movies, television, and the celebrities that inhabit them. In the style of "Beavis and Butthead," Braderman's talking head is superimposed above choice film clips from classic movies and contemporary television programs, as she deconstructs the ways in which the entertainment industry invades "our lives, our beds, and our dreams...
...first segment of her video, "Starstruck," addresses the particular hold that certain celebrities have upon our culture. The segment is highly autobiographical. For several years, Braderman was severely ill with colitis at the same time that her close friend, Leland, was dying of AIDS. For both of them, watching television and classic films served as therapy. As Braderman says, "movie stars dominated our mental life, images became medicine" as they were set free in a "world without sick bodies...
...most people who have been sick for an extended period of time, and have been entertained and relieved by watching a constant stream of television and movies, this section will ring true. My father, for instance, when severely ill like Braderman, escaped from illness into a world of Audrey Hepburn classics and "The Fugitive" reruns...
...from AIDS. While Leland indeed might have sung Ethel Merman's hits from "Gypsy" at his death bed, it is frustrating to see yet another media portrayal of a gay man as a show-tune singing, camp-obsessed queen. It is hard to feel any connection to Leland, since Braderman rarely shows the substance and humanity behind the stereotype. Only when she shows the viewer a photograph of her friend, could I feel any attachment...
...Braderman views the media as an almost monstrous Orwellian creation--we don't just watch television, it also watches and speaks to us. Calling television the "tiny surveillance center in your home," Braderman insists that TV mandates: "Buy this, don't buy that, don't be fat, identify with my beauty, my wealth, my thighs...