Poster Number Two

“Especially when Goku in Mcdonalds stands as the more valuable contribution to modern art, speaking to the iconization of commercialism and the complex identity of the worker in our society, in this essay I will-”

If our minds hadn’t finished building the defense of Goku in McDonald’s, this followup by poster number two gives us the framework.

As with all “in this essay I will” posts, they attempt the not-inglorious feat of throwing girthy words together in a manner that, sufficiently organised, arranged and consolidated, would produce a perfectly sound slab of Argument, a tetris wall of logic destined to fall to earth all at once. As ethereal as the perfect tetris wall manouvre, this essay exists only for a second, perfect in its un-written-ness. As I’ve said elsewhere, my goal is to over-finish these pieces of threatened wisdom, to play beyond the hypothetical perfect tetris move and continue until the screen, both metaphysical and regularphysical, is full. Let’s continue.

Poster number two is almost certainly part of this sub-culture war. They know which side they align with and they know how to bolster the first salvo with an artillery barrage of laden, turgid ammunition. Bombs like “iconization”, “commercialism” and “identity” drop on the heads of those 37 pale girls in bondage, vaporizing what nascent justifications they might have hoped to one day share (or more likely, hoped the curator of the fine art exhibition would share in the accompanying booklet provided gratis upon entry).

Where poster number two takes this bombing run is pretty interesting in itself, and we’ll cover it briefly in Part Two, but I’d like to focus on the manner in which this “in this essay, I will” is deployed: additively, rather than combatively or antagonistically. It seeks to build the mythos of Goku in McDonald’s VS 37 Oil Painting Pale Girls, thereby cementing the poster’s place in the narrative and, more importantly, the thread.

The poster clearly expects those girthwords to do the legwork that I’m doing now, but that expectation belies the mentality of the shared sub-culture between the posters. It is implied that, through being part of this group, you will know how and why “the iconization of commercialism and the complex identity of the worker in our society” is more important and more valuable to modern art as a concept than 37 pale girls in bondage. the legwork I’m doing now, in other words, is done by the group you’re in, so you don’t need to worry about doing it.

Except the legwork is how you get brainstrong. So let’s do it.

Part Two: Journey The West, Comfort Break at Mcdonalds

Welcome to the meat in this roast, the fulcrum about which this essay seesaw swings, the essay in potentia so portentious that I began a whole Substack to discuss it. Let’s look at it again:

“Goku in McDonalds stands as the more valuable contribution to modern art [and] speak[s] to the iconization of commercialism and the complex identity of the worker in our society”

That’s the meatball on the hook that got me to reel myself in on this discussion. The bait was so delightfully picante, so generously seasoned with word-salt and concept-pepper that I swallowed, dear reader. Harder than perhaps any other consumer of this thread did I swallow the self-consciously impotent threat of an essay, using it to fuel my production of the real, self-consciously over-potent delivery of an essay you hold on your screen of choice. That essay stretches luxuriously before you.

In Western society during the 21st Century no anime has come close to matching the impact of Dragonball, followed by Dragonball Z, in terms of popularity, cultural saturation and subsequent imitation. Japanese mangaka Akira Toriyama, the creator and brainbirther of the Dragonball franchise is known across animation studios, game design companies and cartoon networks as the man that brought anime to the West. It is perhaps fitting, then, that Toriyama’s most famous character - Son Goku - is a stylized repackaging of one of the principle characters in Journey to the West, itself one of the most popular literary texts ever, from China.

Journey to the West tells the story of Sun Wukong, also known as “Monkey King” who develops power, knowledge and special techniques through a series of adventures that culminates in his ascension to the “Celestial Bureaucracy” and subsequent fall from grace due to his untamed hubris. The story has been told and retold a myriad times since its 16th-century debut, and is relevant to us because of Toriyama’s adoption of Sun Wukong’s character for his own narrative. Son Goku, known to most simply as Goku, is a clear reference to the Monkey King, with his lighthearted attitude and superhuman abilities, weapon choice and early method of transportation, even down to the simian tail Goku occasionally sports. For a more detailed exploration of the connections between these works, look here and here. Let it suffice to say, the playful monkey that reaches godhood through acquiring wisdom and power is a template used to its maximum with Toriyama’s Goku.

With this precedent in a parallel-history, Goku adopts a sort of pseudo-backstory that presages his rise to legendary cultural icon in the West. Through the usage of Journey to the West’s characterization (along with some generous story beat-matching), Toriyama’s Goku journeys to our own West already with a wealth of cultural artifacts both from Chinese mythology and Japanese contemporary culture. While Sun Wukong journeyed to find the wisdom of the Tao and a way to live forever, Son Goku was sent on a journey that has guaranteed his immortality in terms of cultural osmosis and influence. In short, Goku is the embodiment of all of the power Sun Wukong had (and to be clear, Sun Wukong becomes so powerful he gives himself the name Qitian Dasheng, meaning “great sage who is equal to Heaven”) without most of the downsides in personality (Goku isn’t as cocky as Wukong, nor is he as prone to needless violence). Indeed, it is as though Goku learned the lessons taught to Wukong about those character flaws even as he was being derived from Wukong.

So what we have is a character akin to a god, with little in the way of vice or flaw, tied directly to Chinese mythology, landing on the shores of the anglosphere and generating immense cultural waves. These waves carried the story of Goku and his friends through anime, films, games and spinoffs, but also carried the trope itself through to pop culture, wetting the undammed floors of Western artists and writers and seeping into the unkempt shag carpet of places like DeviantArt, Tumblr and so on. Goku, unlike the West’s similarly powerful and vice-less god-hero Superman aka Clark Kent aka Kal-El, had to train and fight and develop his power, often suffering losses (and multiple actual deaths) on the way. The question at the heart of Goku’s character is not, “How will he save everyone?” or, “How will he stop the villain?”; it is more simple, and thereby more relatable: “Will he overcome?”. This shift in focus and inclusion of potential failure is heartily palpable in the early episodes of the early seasons of Dragonball, the show in which we first meet Goku, and that thrill of danger rarely leaves the show even as the stakes creep toward the abstract and the scale of danger zooms ever outward.

Even if fans of the show and character are unaware of its parallels with Journey to the West, the tried-and-true storyline and characterization imbue Goku and friends with a backbone that has stood the test of time, weathered and refined by centuries of retellings and alterations, leaving us with a polished and efficiently packaged individual that requires all of 20 seconds of screen-time to understand.

With this character firmly in mind, what can be said about the intentions of that brave, foolish or brave-ish fool of a marketer who took Son Goku’s skin and slapped it into a Mcdonald’s advertisement?

The surface-level semiotic gesturing is fairly straightforward - moreso than a lot of more abstract advertisements made for perfumes or vehicles - on one level, Goku can be seen as simply being his symbols. He embodies extremely basic ideas like strength, honour, dedication to training/family/friends and so on. This one-to-one semiotic link allows the visual shorthand to become even shorter; here, a picture is worth a thousand words but actually resembles only like, seven.

Deploying Goku at Mcdonald’s has the basic effect of saying “look, this strong tough man is dedicated to being the best and, depending on the episode, hellbent on destroying the biggest threat to humanity or fighting to return from heaven itself. He is in McDonalds, and is purchasing an item from the menu now. [More than that, he is performing the ‘fusion dance’ with the McDonald’s self-service kiosk, suggesting he wants to become one with his order in a manner far more intimate than mere gastronomic consumption] If he likes it, and is so great, surely you’ll like it too!” This is the most basic reading of celebrity presence in adverts. It is implied that the person onscreen is good, and the thing they’re doing is thereby also good, so you should do it to in order to also become closer to celebrity-level good. easy peasy lemon job.

However, as we’ve said already, Goku is more than merely his characterization: he represents a handful of positive symbols, but also suggests a series of cultural collocations that will, handily enough, differ based on the culture you’re viewing from. [this may be facetious to say at this point in the essay but untangling why Goku in McDonalds appears in a French campaign rather than an American one is beyond our current scope] For some groups of people seeing the ad, Goku may be simply ‘an anime man’, denuded of his in-fiction personality yet still possessing the visible characteristics of strength, determination and physicality alongside the vague impression of novelty and exoticism that manga and anime artstyles still evoke (in Western viewers). For groups aware of anime - and of the Dragonball Z anime in particular - a set of signifiers tied to his journey, his behaviour (Goku is an unabashed glutton and would absolutely frequent McDonald's on the regular) and his cultural capital will come to mind.

For viewers more deeply ensconced in Japanese popular media, Goku may come to symbolize an entirely other set of characteristics: he is popular, but mainstream-popular. He isn’t edgy, or conflicted or multifaceted like a myriad other manga protagonists, and in appealing to this mainstream McDonald’s is making another statement. To paraphrase Lisa Simpson, you have to look at all the characters they aren’t putting in McDonalds. Dragonball, and by microcosm Goku, is simply good. Not complex, not nuanced, not head-scratching in terms of plot or themes or questions raised. He is the fast food of anime. Reassuring in his understandable motives and reliable beliefs. You know what you’re going to get when you go with Goku, and that stability transfers to the menu options and flavours on offer at McDonald’s. He is an icon in the most obvious sense.

This leads us back, like a cat whose food has been moved from its usual spot to one under the stairs to avoid their owner stepping in it, to the tweet of poster number two:

“Especially when Goku in Mcdonalds stands as the more valuable contribution to modern art, speaking to the iconization of commercialism and the complex identity of the worker in our society, in this essay I will-”

We have the iconization part in-hand. We can infer the next $5 word’s intended meaning fairly easily now.

Commercialism is almost always used as a derogatory term to describe the inbuilt gutterfighting and bottomchasing of capitalism. It highlights the goal of businesses to maximise profit and minimize losses, above and before all else. If this is controversial for you I invite you to email me at fantasticedifice@gmail.com with a message describing your reasons and justifications for being the world’s densest baby.

McDonald’s has a 70-year history expertise in marketing, cost-efficiency and market saturation, with over 38,000 restaurants globally, $33.1 billion in assets and a global market share around 21% of the entire fast food market. They are what many would consider the paragon of commercial success and do not do anything on a whim, even when licensing out advertising campaigns to individual territories. It is with this starkly effective business that we mix the imagery and symbology of Goku in order to produce both the statement put out by McDonald’s and the wider, perhaps more artistically-minded statement suggested by poster number two. The former is clear thanks to our above work: Goku is strong and good, but not complex, and he likes the food, which is good and simple too. [for those interested in the whole picture, the text “venez comme vous êtes” in the top corner means “Come as you are”, and was McDonald’s slogan from around 2008. Apparently it is still used today, as a kind of analogue to the anglosphere’s “I’m Lovin’ It”]

There is a reason most every fast food corporation has a mascot. The King, the Colonel and the Clown are Burger King, KFC and McDonald’s, insofar as they present the front-facing… well, face, of the business. Having an individual icon to connect the usually-intimate process of finding, cooking and eating food to the much more abstract process of buying fast food from a stranger is self-evidently effective. We’re not expected to buy a meal from an underpaid, anonymous-but-for-the-nametag uniformed member of staff; we’re expected to buy a meal from Ronald McDonald himself, or at least from a representative avatar. Iconization in this sense humanizes the corporation just enough to mask the commercialism inherent in that corp. The primary icon is then bolstered by the secondary and tertiary icons deployed in adverts and marketing campaigns, which is where Goku’s deployment comes in. He isn’t engaging with the commercial aspect, justifying the value of a Royale with cheese when compared to similar products from competing vendors; he’s buying a McDonald’s with the determination and confidence usually reserved for an intense battle or training montage. The iconization is masking the commercialism, even as it reinforces it; pasting his symbolically-expedient visage onto a photo of a restaurant is a masterclass of minimizing cost to maximise profit. The image above speaks to the power global businesses have in wielding icons, characters, concepts and emotions through advertising to further their business interests. They have access to the license rights and marketing resources to turn a beloved character from a show made thousands of miles away into a customer, their customer, and they can turn that manufactured custom into real tangible profits by selling your beloved character back to you.

Here is where the tweet of poster number two derails itself. When it brings in “the complex identity of the worker in our society” I think they’re thinking of an image, so far unfindable by me, that depicts Goku as a fast service restaurant worker, taking orders at the counter of a McDonald’s rather than giving the order as a customer. That interpretation is as interesting as it is devoid of pictoral representation through Google Image searches. This interpretational rail-jump will briefly be considered before moving to the rail that has evidence, with Goku placing an order through a self-service machine in a McDonald’s.

Rail 1: Goku-as-service-staff

This imagining renders Goku as the provider of McDonald’s and thus transfers the above qualities we’ve associated with him even more strongly onto Mcdonald’s. He becomes the avatar for the very concept of Mcdonald’s itself, melding the idea of fast-service food with strength, vitality, confidence and novelty in a way unimaginable when the Clown is on the the scene. The semiotics morph to suggest Goku believes so much in the quality of the McDonald’s food menu, he not only eats it - he works to produce it. That’s powerful, and I think this version of events works far better as an advertisement, not least because it implicitly praises the workers in all McDonald’s franchise locations by implying they are on the same level as Son Goku.

On a deeper, more bass-heavy note, we might see the interpolation of Goku into the uniform and perhaps the hat of a McDonald’s worker as being an artistic statement about who might find themselves working a low-paid service job, and what set of events can bring someone to that position. As we’ve discussed, Goku has achieved a great deal in his life on-screen and in-manga, including murdering the entirety of an army (the Red Ribbon Army, led by Emperor Pilaf, not (yet) killed by Goku) as well as the murder of Lucifer himself, who was attempting to blow up the Sun. Someone such as this has a resume and set of skills that would most likely qualify them for any number of jobs, yet we see, in this imagining, Goku brought to an entry-level position in a global corporation that is routinely cited as being pretty darn evil. We might interpret this situation as being indicative of the precarity of life under capitalism, or an indictment of the proverbial book-judgement-by-cover, since, clearly, we can never know what kind of person might be serving us at the next drive-through.

Rail 2: Goku-as-customer

This parallel reality is more interesting, if less effective as an advertisement, since poster number two’s “worker” in this version is not Goku, but the machine with which he interacts. The interaction is now not between the viewer (the presumed customer in the previous, fabricated reality) and Goku-as-staff, but between Goku and a self-service machine, with Goku interacting as a surrogate for the expected desires of the viewer.

This shifted perspective raises more interesting questions to me because the expected position of the viewer is now outside of consumption; we aren’t about to buy anything, we’re merely viewing a transaction and asked to evaluate that transaction’s relevance to our wants and needs. Goku remains a symbolically rich icon, but those symbols now serve to embody a sort of idealized consumer rather than server. His semiotic heft is applied to the group being marketed-to in the same way Chris Evans is applied to masculine perfume sales; he smells like this, and lives like this, and looks like this, so you can emulate some nebulous amount of his lifestyle by buying the smell that potentially factors into some amount of that lifestyle’s perpetuation.

To poster number two’s credit, this narrative arrangement still allows analysis when the “complex identity of the worker” is applied to a machine. The self-service machine that stands in-place of a human server has its own set of symbols and societal considerations that enrich the story of Goku in Mcdonald’s to a much greater degree than the first rail did. Now we wrestle with questions about the disappearing jobs market in the service and retail sector, the ethics around removing human interaction from intimate processes like food preparation and delivery, the psychological effect of efficiency-optimization on those workers not yet culled from systems increasingly populated by machinery, who now have to work at the pace of self-service machines (who don’t need breaks or holidays or sick days or a pension), and so on.

The inclusion of the self-service machine in this imagery demands answers to questions around the complex identity of the worker by the human worker’s omission in the transaction - the transaction initiated by the idealized, god-like, heroic customer. Once again, we have to look at the images they didn’t show us, and question why those stories were less palatable than this one for the global corporation that funded the ad campaign.

We have the implicit acceptance by Goku of the self-service machine’s presence and usage (despite Goku in-fiction barely being able to work any form of technology, nearly dying due to this ignorance dozens of times) and the conspicuous absense of any other McDonald’s staff in-frame. The identity of the workers is intentionally sanitized out of existence as the image describes the preferred method of fast-service food delivery to their customers. We don’t need to consider the humans that go into the making of our orders, according to this ad - we merely need to emulate our hero and order with confidence to embody his physique and his ideals. I leave it to the reader to decide how that process of worker disenfranchisement feels.

Further hay can be made about the abstracted process being observed when seeing Goku as a bundle of symbols rather than a man that represents those symbols. What Goku is, is a cartoon depiction of an alien fighter. He is a fiction, shown here ordering from a machine. To put it clearly, the perpetuation of consumerism is here being enacted without any living person engaging in it. In this interpretation I was reminded of the character K, from Bladerunner 2049, which I reviewed for rs21 here. His ‘real’ ‘name’ is KD6-3.7, though he is known to his holographic partner as Joe, and in the first half-hour of the film we see him go to work, buy dinner and return to his furnished apartment to relax and consume both his meal and his lover, prepackaged and modified to suit his tastes. Yet K is a replicant, a synthetic lifeform given sentience and sapience in order to fulfil the tasks allocated by a hyperconsumerist society. He embodies consumerism literally as well as figuratively, born to work, buy, consume and nothing more. His desires aren’t his own - they are explicitly manufactured for him in order for him to have something to do. I was reminded of this character because K emphasises the endpoint of a system that seeks to perpetuate itself over and before seeking to fill the needs of a potential market. K doesn’t need to exist; his job is to ‘decommission’ replicants that broke out of the cycle of compliant consumption he lives within. He is consumerism minimizing losses. Likewise, Goku in Mcdonald’s emphasises the power of the system we have now to perpetuate and generate desire, to build markets to sell to rather than finding an organic, living market that has needs to fill. Goku doesn’t need to buy anything from McDonald’s; he is the strongest living being in the world/solar system/universe (depending on what episode you’re watching) and could take anything by force, not least a double filet ‘o fish and McFlurry. McDonald’s has compressed and warped the character of Goku into a box that can be sold to, decommissioning traits that might show him as functioning outside of compliant consumerism. Goku, a character with mythical provenance and symbol of joyful power, winner of world martial arts tournaments many times over is now a worker spending his wages in a McDonald’s. The work Goku does for those wages is irrelevant for this analysis; all we need know is that he intends to pay for the order, which can be implied by this being an advertisement for an idealized transaction by McDonald’s.

This second rail certainly has a lot to say about “… the iconization of commercialism and the complex identity of the worker in our society”, but the premise of the thread was to say that all of the above and more is a more valuable contribution to modern art than 37 oil paintings of a pale girl in bondage. to verify that, we need to wrap our mental mitts around who is deciding on the value of art pieces, and what they know in order to arrive at that value.

Part Three: Confluence of Shibboleths

I don’t think it’s surprising to see poster number one state the novel, symbol-laden Goku in McDonald’s is more valuable than “37 oil paintings of a pale girl in bondage”. The reader may well agree purely on the face of it; Who wants that many attempts at capturing a single idea cluttering their bedroom wall? Who wants to defend the manifestation of the male gaze, masquerading as artistic freedom? Art that relies entirely on the viewer’s appreciation of Aesthetics, or the focus on beauty and sensation, may only hold so much water when compared to art that demands analysis, and contains imagery that invites multiple ‘readings’. How many ways can a nude be read? Fewer than 37, almost certainly.

Yet the dismissal of the oil painter over the digital artist is not guaranteed. Such a stance relies on the agreement, tacit or otherwise, fully or partially, with poster number one’s view of art - its purpose and, connectedly, its value - and - I would argue - the orbiting set of beliefs that lead them to hold that view. This latter point is why poster number two so easily adds to the thread. They are in-sync with poster number one’s schemas and extend the discussion through the demonstration of their in-sync-ness. Both posters demonstrate their belief that the “art for art’s sake” Aesthetic movement is inferior to the more erratic Postmodernist forms. I’ll briefly describe these camps before we progress:

The Aesthetic Movement

Developed during a time of prescriptive, parochial and moralistic domination, the Aesthetic movement denied all that had been demanded of art hither-to: art need not be a function of the Church, or a vehicle for fables, or a weapon to curtail vice, or a teaching instrument for the lower classes. Art could be - should be, in many Aesthetically minded artists - useless, and beautiful because of that uselessness. Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, apparent originator of the movement in the mid 1850s, said:

“Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless. Everything useful is ugly for it expresses a need, and the needs of men are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor, weak nature. The most useful place in the house is the lavatory.”

Oscar Wilde was a great proponent of this philosophy, and mocked Charles Dickens - his contemporary - for his earnest attempts at moralizing the lives of his characters. While both Gautier and Wilde’s work can hardly be called apolitical, they primarily sought to bring pleasure, or at least bring sensation, to their audience, rather than a political treatise wrapped in human clothing. Their art called to hedonism itself, and demanded attention as much as it expressed disenchantment with mundane society. This sentiment held sway until around 1900.

We may begin to see how a pale girl in bondage fits into this movement. Quite aside from the imagery itself and its clear intent to scandalize the viewer, the sheer quantity of said girls displays the mantra of the Aesthetic movement perfectly: art for art’s sake, not for sale or analysis or disassembly or even scrutiny. This understanding of art couldn’t care less about precision or subtext; the connective power of human expression and emotion is the focus of the Aesthetic movement.

The Postmodernist Movement

Around fifty years after heights of Wildean hedonism, the world was a very different place. With most experts agreeing Postmodernism truly ‘began’ in the 1950s, we can easily guess the causes and topics being tackled by an art movement following a period of nigh-apocalyptic violence. Defined by its skepticism toward Modernism (a movement that sought ‘newness’, encouraging self-expression in all forms and optimistic about Man’s place in the increasingly industrial world), Postmodernism sought to deconstruct, to dissassemble and contradict that which came before. Reality is not a solid, indissoluble concept within Postmodernism - or rather, reality itself is not found wholly within humanity’s understanding. Instead, we construct our own realities that are subject to change as social and cultural forces pressure us, in various ways.

A great and well-loved (by me) example of postmodernism is Magritte’s Treachery of Images: