South Park: canadian gadflies
Heavy Metal shocked us by having nude, animated people frolic on-screen, (as did Fantastic Planet, etc) which is to say it was a cartoon for grown-ups. Or, to look at it another way, the cartoon grew up with its initial audience, that is, the audience grew up to make their own cartoon. But, in spite of the casual drug use and the graphically-inked skin, Heavy Metal was still pretty simple. Next, enter Japanimation, an artform unto itself, which, with feature-length movies like Grave of the Fireflies and Akira, introduced some much-needed narrative complexity into these 'cartoons,' which, in spite of Disney's singalong efforts, were quickly becoming a viable medium for presenting meaningful stories. The trailer for Happiness, after all--a, somber, 'serious,' adult movie if there ever was one--was animated. And what are The Simpsons about if not a level of social critique most children aren't really interested in? In light of all this, it would seem that Trey Parker and Matt Stone's South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, with its host of musical numbers, poor animation, and profanity that might make Richard Pryor blush--not to mention its 'fad' status and T-shirt sales--would be something of a throwback, atavistic by current anime standards. In spite of itself, though, it's not.
It actually has quite a complex little rhetoric smuggled in under all the self-effacement. The story is simple: the South Park gang we know and love from Comedy Central manages to sneak into an R-rated movie, which instantly corrupts their vocabulary, which in turn attracts the ire of the PTA-contingent, who directs their collective anger at the Canadian moviemakers, which--as everything escalates at light speed (i.e., faster than logic)--results soon enough in America declaring war on Canada (and nearly allows Satan and Sadam Hussein to take over the world, which 'dead' Kenny gleans on his tour through Hell, but that's another story). All of which serves to show not how important the profanity in the movie (Asses of Fire) actually is, but how important we can make it, should we choose. And of course it's all self-reflexive, which is where the complexity comes into play: the movie-in-the movie--Asses of Fire--is a hardly-veiled version of South Park (Bigger, Longer, & Uncut), which in turn suggests that when all the profanity begins to offend us, as it's programmed to, we can either get riled in the manner of South Park's PTA-contingent or simply sit back, let the profanity etc wash over us.
Granted, at some level this is the same choice you have with any 'offensive' movie, but South Park takes it one step further: by drawing the PTA-contingent as so comically misdirected and hypocritical, their response is thus pre-coded for us as 'wrong,' ridiculous, overblown. Meaning it anticipates our eventual criticism and deconstructs it, leaves us no real choice but to sit back and try to enjoy. Of course the oft-cited problem with this metafictional approach is that, since the work is responding solely to itself, it's solipsistic, onanistic--so self-involved as to be void of any meaning, where meaning is defined as 'having some objective correlation to the world.' The thing is, though, in spite of its narrative self-involvement, the caricatures South Park draws, however harsh, are nevertheless accurate. If you can't appreciate that, then look around, you may just be on the PTA side of the river.
(c) 1999 Stephen Graham Jones, http://www.cinemuck.com
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