From lifeguard to political fetish: why the mask will be the most powerful element of the new era
Today everything is exposed than ever but, at the same time, the truth is more difficult to recognize.Therefore, an aesthetic resource as simple as covering the face has become the perfect metaphor to discover us.The post covid-19 era cannot be understood without masked and masks, who say goodbye to the stigma of danger to become the most identity instrument at our disposal.If it is a sign of illegality, concealment and terrorism, with the new normality the mask has become a symbol of community, solidarity, empowerment.
The greatest expert we know on the subject, Servando Rocha, premumory some dark and dangerous things.The mask book and masked a few days before the zero coronavirus patient was identified in Wuhan.This essay, which will become exposure to the late 2021 in the CCCB of Barcelona, is an alternative story of the last century and a half through those who hid their image.That is why nothing more relevant than analyzing with its author this mad and future uncertain present where the world looks like a renewed face.
Anonymous: The mockery that phagocytted the system
We saw her once again a week before the alarm state was decreed in Spain.Jusapol, the Ultra Association of the National Police and Civil Guard, concentrated in front of Congress to demand salary comparison with the Mossos d’Esquadra, Ertzaintza and local police officers.A unique face emerged between the flares and flags of Spain.The calls had encouraged to participate with Anonymous masks and a clothing code based on the aesthetics of the black block (a manifestation tactic of the antinuclear protests of the eighties in which everyone wore black clothes to avoid being identified and create a revolutionary presence).
The image of Ortega Smith, general secretary of Vox, distributing hugs at street level among the congregates, was disconcerting.Isn't the mask of the Anonymous tochivist group supposed to be unfailingly linked to the anti -system left?Servando Rocha has an answer: "With the masks it passes a little as with the works of art: once created, they emancipate themselves to give free way to interpretation".
One of the most perverse cases is that of the face that Anonymous wielded just over a decade and since then became the photogenic sauce of so many protests.“Jusapol may know what the original meaning of this mask is, but when they are doing what they are doing is adopting the language of the time.And the image of these times is an ‘rebel’ image.It is the same language that Vox is using, that of the Guerrillas of Communication, with Santiago Abascal talking about his party as ‘resistance’.They are not inventing anything, it is the most reactionary discourse of the American alt right [the alternative] American.Look at the social home Madrid [the Okupa Neonazi Movement], which also manifested itself by launching Xenophobic slogans a couple of years ago with its members covered by Anonymous masks.The language of the time is the rebellion, but you cannot be rebellious when the rebellion is the norm ".
Recall: The Anonymous mask leaves V de Vendetta.The threat of the ironist iron fist served as a breeding ground for this graphic novel written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd, with a revolutionary anarchist per protagonist who adds the mask of Guy Fawkes to overthrow an authoritarian government in a dystopian England.Guy Fawkes was the leader of the conspiracy of gunpowder who in 1605 tried to fly the British Parliament dynamite.It was used by Anonymous for the first time in 2008, when its activists were planted before several headquarters of the Cienciology Church to denounce its obscurantism.Since then until today, the use of this face has had countless declines in globalized manifestations.The racial protests that expand these days throughout the planet have returned it to the news.The murder of George Floyd followed an Anonymous video promising to expose the abuses of the Minneapolis Police.Your first attack: Timber your website.
We already know that the system phagocies everything.As Rocha says: “It's what always happens with symbols.If the mask serves to differentiate and point to dissidents, its mass use produces the opposite effect and perverts it ”.When the Occupy London movement, Alan Moore walked by asking the camping why they carried the venotta va.The answer was always similar: to express against capitalism.Paradoxically, they did one of the most profitable merchandising products of the Warner, responsible for the film adaptation produced by the Wachowski sisters: a symbol of the anti -capitalist struggle turned into just the opposite.Moore himself denied the film for teaming the spirit of the comic and demanded that they remove his name from the credits.He has also had to deal with another frustration: copyright go to his colleague, illustrator David Lloyd, who devised that faithful sardonic smile reflection of this sad and mocking world.
Trump's grimace against the mask of those who protest
It was written by journalist Amanda HESS last week at The New York Times following the protests that travel.UU.After the murder of George Floyd: “The mask is a public health artifact, but it has also been revealed as a mask in the most traditional sense: a tool in a social ritual, a fetish that identifies political ideas, gender expressionand the relationship with the truth of each person ".And he pointed out that those who have positioned themselves against their use are mainly Republicans and men.
Donald Trump himself refuses to give an example, putting it in public and even walks with those who have stolen a photo with her.He doesn't need it, he already has his mask: his own face.Servando Rocha Secund this idea.“Trump perfectly embodies the archetype of the comic archivillano.His face is a grimace.And we already know, as Oscar Wilde said, that the mask never lies.Trump is always used to tell his truth.When he proclaims that he will consider the antifa movement as a terrorist organization for encouraging disturbances, he is also playing with the policy of faces.Because there is no anti -fascist organization that you can locate with a postal code.What there are is anti -fascist people who ally against social injustices, but it is the sum of many groups.It is the same speech that Bush used.In key electoral moments, Bush brought out the face of fear, Bin Laden's, with those videos with all that terrorist paraphernalia.But, after Bin Laden, terror has lost his face.And that is much more threatening.That is why this virus era terrifies us much more ”.
Here, in Madrid's Calle Núñez de Balboa, we also saw the spark of the masked tension broke out.The right was thrown into the street to claim ‘Libertad’, challenging Sánchez's government, skipping the security distances and covering their faces with the flag of Spain.The known as the Cayetanos revolution or the spring of the fachalecos recorded a thing, as Rocha summarizes: “The left has an equivocal, because he thinks that the masking belongs to him.In this case we are facing the anarcofascistas, nothing new: they ask for all the freedom to continue maintaining the same order of things.And the mask is a perfect identity element.Create a spirit of community, where the ‘I’ disappears in favor of ‘us’.And that is something super powerful.If on top of the masking you can dare to commit illegal acts, such as disobeying an alarm state, then even ”.
In the case of the Cayetans, the symbol was evident: the traditional appropriation of the Spanish flag by the right to fly the values of patriotism, with rojigualdas masks bought in the Chinese bazaar of the neighborhood of the neighborhood."That is the best metaphor of this era.And the fact that China, being the new world order, has sold us defective masks, ”concludes Rocha.
Who watches the watchman...black?
A few months before the world turned a turn, Damon Lindelof (Lost Cooking) premiered the Watchmen series in HBO, a very particular tribute to the Magna Homonym of Alan Moore with the cartoonist Dave Gibbons.The graphic novel also focuses on a dystopia where Nixon remains in the mid -eighties the US president.UU.And the masked guards are persecuted or retired (yes, after having helped the country to achieve world hegemony).The mantra that travels the streets in his vignettes insists on a close reflection: ‘Who watches the guards?’.
Together with the criticism of ultraconservative governments or panic to a nuclear holocaust, Alan Moore introduced the feminist political agendYour essential plots.The reading of Lindelof, which serves as a fascinating update (or even continuation) of the original work, brings that agenda to the present with an intersectional vision: to the familiar sexist violence adds the consequences of structural racism.And he does it by drawing an alternative reality that takes as a starting point a real fact: the racial massacre in Tulsa (Oklahoma) of 1921.A fact none until recently by the history books in which 35 apples of the district known as Black Wall Street (for housing some of the black families who had made the greatest fortune in the USA.UU.) were attacked by a white mob and bombed by private airplanes.The spark exploded for the same thing as many times: a black shoe cleaner was accused of sexually assaulting a white elevatorist and lynching at the police station, with the consequent confrontation to its doors between out -of -American and African -American supremacists indignant.The recognized figure of dead black people amounts to 39, although some sources suggest that the genocide could reach 300.
In the series, which passes 34 years after the comic, the spectrum of the Kux Klan survives in time, pouring a war against minorities.Only instead of hood, they use the Rorschach mask, one of the most enigmatic and deranged characters of the original graphic novel.The guards act infiltrated in a police officer who works to repair racial injustice and hides their identity after masks to avoid the aggressions of the supremacists.
Together with the black protagonist, Sister Night, a day and justice police officer, there is a character that visionary that visionary the racial struggle we are seeing these days in the US disturbances for the murder of George Floyd: masked justice, thehooded with a rope around his neck that hides the color of his black skin (even makeup the contour of his eyes, the only thing we see) to preserve his hero condition.According to Servando Rocha there is nothing more than this: “It is the figure of hunting hunting.This is what many protesters threw us in face when some tried to neutralize the protests, focusing on looting and violence.They told us: ‘We have been systematically hunted for centuries, and the last decades with the greatest virulence.Now we are the ones who are going to invest the litmus ’.There is a very pertinent speech in that last days of activist Tamika Mallory that says: ‘I don't care if a supermarket burns ... Where is the great supermarket when they lynch us, when they stop us, when they kill us?”.The character of justice masked in the Watchmen series comes to represent all this anger.
And, to all this, where are the authentic superheroes when they are needed?
The injustices in history have always had those who fight them ... at least in comicra fiction.The Phantom, El Zorro, The Spirit or Superman have remained alert to save the world of himself and from those who threaten him.In the mass concentrations of these days, it could not be otherwise, some have given their faces.The first weekend after the murder of George Floyd, between the smoke of the altercations in Minneapolis, Batman himself walked, in what could be a scene extracted from Christopher Nolan's trilogy.The Joker did the same in Chicago, setting fire to a police car, in an image that referred to the revolts of the final sequence of the recent film with the smile of Joaquin Phoenix raising grotesque between weapons, saved stores and burning vehicles.
Chantal Mouffe political theoric defined radical democracy as that in which the relations of forces are between such.It is not about fighting with despicable enemies, who have been lost respect, but to identify true adversaries.The intelligences of evil such as lex luthor, Magneto or the Joker are adversaries with a fundamental role in the life of the heroes: they make them better.And with this, true antagonism is a democratic health index.Or what is the same: a balance between the forces of good and evil, they carry the mask they carry.
The question is: Who do we need here?To the dark gentleman or the infinite joke?Servando Rocha sees it very clear: "Possibly the Joker better represents the time of the insurgents, and does not Batman, the millionaire philanthropist who wants to clean the streets of slag and dirt".In fact, one of Black Lives Matter memes that circulated in recent days was wondering why Batman's mask left his chin exposed.The answer?"To be able to verify its whiteness".
