The question after MTV's replay of the 2007 VMAs is - who would I least like to be trapped in a room with for my existential pop hell: Britney Spears, Sarah Silverman or Lauren Caitlin Upton, aka Miss Teen USA South Carolina?

Online, both Britney and Lauren inspire anti-woman essentializing sentiments that fly around the anon response world as 1. end of civilized culture 2. evidence of inferiority/unfitness of the gender 3. spoiled/pampered out of touch princesses 4. just little girls having bad days "leave her alone guys she's just nuahvess" and the resulting rejection of critical engagement. Both lines of argument are kneejerk.

MTV teleprompted Miss Teen USA South Carolina's airheadness this time

Lauren, well. The setup for her was - beauty pageant contestant + question about downfall of educational standards = the next Will Farrell movie. She could have made an intelligent comment about educational standards but instead she jumbled a pre-configured response about Iraq and stumbled like...a career politician being asked about his/her voting record or stand on an obscure issue. Training public people who need votes to never say "I don't know" means getting ridiculous sound bites. Pulling her into the VMA context to read a teaser-teleprompter and just "be her cute little blonde train wreck self" seemed like a perfect way for the producer to make a very sad nod to "this 5 minutes" fad viral video sublebrity. She got to make a mockery of herself - the most American form of public redemption - and the show got another "hot" blonde who didn't have to be treated as a person of credibility.

Britney - all that you want her to be.

What that what they wanted from Britney? What Spears did at the VMAs was unprofessional, sloppy, inconsiderate of her audience, amateurish. How it looked was, to me, amazing - the reversal of reality television in which everyday people wish to be stars. Here, Britney becomes a really insecure, badly rehearsed youtube attempt at teenpop choreography, a worse-than-Fischerspooner lip syncer halfheartedly into her own joke, only her joke is mainstream television and it's not a joke (none of that music critic "R.Kelly we're not laughing at him but with him" cowardice here). She gets to be mediocre on an international screen. It's a joke to me inasmuch as her body, which looks by this time not dissimilar to mine, was juxtaposed to, moving with and against sculpted, chiseled, taut pro show people's. She is no longer one of them. She has just a normally out of shape otherwise Western conventionally "regular" feminine looking body. It was an alarming peek into mediocrity in an unforgiving medium.
Given the months of celebrity-hate baiting of Spears, I can't help but think the "comeback" was part of a cruel joke on behalf of MTV, which like Spin is in an endgame of meta-snark of its own hypemongering machine. Feed them, they eat you and yes, they spit.

Sara Silverman's mono log

Which is perhaps why they sent in the "voice of reason" Sarah Silverman. And I thought I already hated hearing about diarrhea... I have resisted writing down my thoughts on Silverman because I cannot separate my reason from my visceral reaction. I find her repugnant and I can't hide it. The deadpan delivery of her character, meant to discomfort, shock, disarm, fades quickly and all that is left for me is an incredibly small circle of racist clichés slamming into an audience as if it were a coastline, that is to say, without concern for impact. I don't think she is making an important criticism of everyday racism, I think she is profiting off of it.

Her physical humor bit - the painfully slow-motion stretch of her lips into a vagina - was the end of a series of poorly written tabloid recitations of Britney's shortcomings, meant to shock because of proximity both to the star and to the starmaking machine. It was an interesting gesture - a bit of 70s style performance art, whipping out the vag right on mainstream tv - but linked to Britney it lost power and became just another TMZ-style snarkbite. Her bit about Kanye/Cee-lo was just plainstatedly cruel to two of pop music's most important black men and her attempt to ingratiate herself after such a brutal slap was a home turn to superficial Jewish-self hate via an Amy Winehouse nose joke that offered little solace. I wish someone in that audience had had the nerve to boo, engage, deflate or question that character.
So, when all else fails ye comics pull out...shit. Eddie Murphy told good shit jokes, but Silverman. I mean, she even makes me feel sorry for shit. Working on "the other side" of the star making world, I have seen media folks get really ramped about anyone who can become a mouthpiece of "real" disdain for the mass spectacle (ahm Nick Sylvester), and I am tempted to read Silverman's placement as yet again the choice of bitter insiders peaking their heads out from behind the curtain by programming her tired minstrel standup as a display of anti-PC anxiousness, the extreme privledge of those who suffer no material or emotional fallout of discrimination, or that very same closet racism Silverman so ineloquently attempts to diffuse with her character. Her comments section is down on her blog, I don't wonder why.

When people write about Britney and Miss South Carolina "setting the gender back 20 years" whatever that means (afros? Disco? NYpunk - SEND ME BACK already!) I kind of wonder more about the post-Vice/Borat/Silverman "everyone knows we're not racist/sexist/homophobic/anti-handicap but what else is there to joke about?" line of verbal and written performance. It just doesn't seem to be helping anybody get freer or be more equal. It just seems ugly - not like a flabby tummy or a dumb answer is ugly - but ugly on the inside. So put me in a room with Miss South Carolina, and give one of us a map, won't you?