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the papers want to know whose shirts you wear
Sunday, 9 March 2008 12:30 pmThis morning's dose of insanity from the Daily Voice:
DEMON LIVES IN OUMA'S LEG!
I love the way this works, it's classic tabloid. The important thing is the combination of the way-out with the extremely trivial: no-one ever sees Elvis performing as a singer or talking to the president, they see him flipping burgers in a greasy spoon in the back of beyond. Similarly, the basic weirdness here - demon possession - is not allowed to approach significance: the wayward demon possesses, not a politician or a celebrity, but a normal person. This means it's a strangeness which is beautifully balanced between novelty/difference/weirdness on one hand, and complete accessibility on the other - it happens to someone very like the reader. The process is taken even further by the fact that it doesn't just possess a normal person, it's a grandmother, familiarised with the personal, affectionate epithet of "Ouma", and it doesn't possess her - it possesses her leg, further trivialising the event. Tabloid reporting is very much about sensationalising daily events, but it's a particularly tightly-focussed sensationalism which domesticates as much as it exaggerates.
I am, incidentally, typing this in Notepad++, preparatory to switching on the Evil Landlord's computer and madly connecting to Teh Internets for five frantic minutes, during which I post, read Friends and email, and try to achieve a fraction of my usual leisurely browse before the whole thing crashes and boots me out. Curse this techno-jinx.
Last Night I Dreamed: I was surrounded by the disembodied, floating, transparent faces of a whole bunch of elderly people, none of whom I knew, who buzzed around my head in a slow, dreamy fashion. I woke up sitting up in bed trying to bat them away and saying plaintively "But I can't deal with this!"
DEMON LIVES IN OUMA'S LEG!
I love the way this works, it's classic tabloid. The important thing is the combination of the way-out with the extremely trivial: no-one ever sees Elvis performing as a singer or talking to the president, they see him flipping burgers in a greasy spoon in the back of beyond. Similarly, the basic weirdness here - demon possession - is not allowed to approach significance: the wayward demon possesses, not a politician or a celebrity, but a normal person. This means it's a strangeness which is beautifully balanced between novelty/difference/weirdness on one hand, and complete accessibility on the other - it happens to someone very like the reader. The process is taken even further by the fact that it doesn't just possess a normal person, it's a grandmother, familiarised with the personal, affectionate epithet of "Ouma", and it doesn't possess her - it possesses her leg, further trivialising the event. Tabloid reporting is very much about sensationalising daily events, but it's a particularly tightly-focussed sensationalism which domesticates as much as it exaggerates.
I am, incidentally, typing this in Notepad++, preparatory to switching on the Evil Landlord's computer and madly connecting to Teh Internets for five frantic minutes, during which I post, read Friends and email, and try to achieve a fraction of my usual leisurely browse before the whole thing crashes and boots me out. Curse this techno-jinx.
Last Night I Dreamed: I was surrounded by the disembodied, floating, transparent faces of a whole bunch of elderly people, none of whom I knew, who buzzed around my head in a slow, dreamy fashion. I woke up sitting up in bed trying to bat them away and saying plaintively "But I can't deal with this!"
