We knew it was coming: Cameras and production trucks were spotted in and around Zuccotti Park last fall, scenes from which later appeared in MTV’s The Real World-style “True Life: I’m Occupying Wall Street” and, on this summer’s movie screens, The Dark Knight Rises. But few could have predicted that Occupy’s protest politics would reach the bubbly Step Up dance movies. With Step Up Revolution, the fourth in the franchise, the dancers take up the defense of a Miami neighborhood about to be razed to make way for a high-rise development project. Naturally, they do so through the power of dance, planning a series of flash mobs to draw attention to, and sometimes to disrupt outright, the redevelopment proceedings. Like that other, more notorious summer blockbuster, they even call their rehearsal space the “bat cave.”
“Revolution” might be overstating the case (though certainly the word is an improvement over one of the film’s working titles, “Step Up 4Eva”). At the beginning of the film, “the Mob,” as the protagonists call themselves, is only interested in racking up YouTube views; the motley assortment of hotel employees and other working-class kids, led by the beefy Sean (Ryan Guzman), hopes to win a contest by creating the first video to top 10 million views, the award money for which would presumably allow them to “step up” in life, so to speak. Once it’s announced that their neighborhood is imperiled, however, the dancers find themselves politicized.
“Enough with performance art, it’s time for protest art,” chirps Emily, one of the few female dancers (played by So You Think You Can Dance? finalist Kathryn McCormick). Sean, her romantic interest, concurs: “Instead of getting hits, we can make a statement.” Ostensibly that statement, dramatically graffitied on the inside of a giant robot-salaryman’s briefcase at the conclusion of the group’s next flashmob, is “We are not 4 sale” — though, as the film’s dance-antics progress, the clarity of that message becomes increasingly diluted.
Things take a dark turn when Eddy (Misha Gabriel), Sean’s possessive friend, learns that Emily is the daughter of the wealthy developer in charge of the project, Mr. Anderson (Peter Gallagher). Eddy organizes his own renegade flash mob, this time crashing a gala benefit with gas masks, smoke canisters and ample table-smashing. The Mob is disqualified from their contest for having broken the law. “We turned something positive into something ugly,” Eddy laments.
The scene and its fallout recall the divisive and often violent black bloc tactics that emerged in the U.S. during the Seattle World Trade Organization demonstrations in 1999, and more recently in protests associated with the Occupy movement. Step Up Revolution is unequivocal in its condemnation of Eddy’s terroristic performance, though, strangely, of all the performances, its messages are especially coherent and effective, appearing on hijacked television monitors to smear and shame Mr. Anderson. In anger, it seems, the Mob is at its most articulate.
After a few hugs, the embattled and divided Mob decides to come together again to crash the ribbon-cutting ceremony in order to show Emily’s dad and the mayor the cultural richness of the people soon to be displaced — which consists of robot dance moves, bungee cord theatrics and a parkour brigade. After Sean and Emily slow dance, her father wipes away tears and calls the whole project off to an ecstatically cheering crowd. As a final flourish — and here I kid you not — a marketing executive steps forward and offers the Mob a contract to produce “edgy” ads with Nike. More cheers. Apparently, they are 4 sale.
It’s easy to scoff at their corporate sell-out. We should remember, however, that these are not committed radicals, but underemployed young people — their salvation, after all, is in a $100,000 viral video contest — whose homes fall victim to eminent domain. Underscoring their precarity, we see Eddy get fired for showing up late to his waitstaff job. They, like many others, become political through circumstances that affect their immediate lives. It’s no wonder, then, that given the chance, they’ll accept a regular paycheck, especially if it means pursuing their dancing passions.
The Step Up movies each, in addition to showcasing killer dance moves, reaffirm such aspirational narratives of class ascension. It’s a formula you probably know well, one that has remained surprisingly consistent in popular, lowbrow fare, from Singin’ in the Rain and West Side Story to Dirty Dancing and competitive reality television shows like American Idol and SYTYCD: A tough but talented outsider turns higher-society heads with a song, a dance or a sport, and, after a few etiquette blunders, arrives in the nick of time to deliver a stellar performance. In every film, even the most conservative holdouts break into applause, signaling their acceptance of the newcomer whose funky, fusion-y style both revitalizes and reaffirms the cultural authority they represent. For Step Up’s typically teenage protagonists, this means institutional acceptance, whether at the fictional Maryland School for the Arts seen in Step Up and Step Up 2: The Streets, or a double major in dance and engineering at NYU in Step Up 3D. Given these ironclad expectations, it’s no wonder Step Up Revolution’s dancers seize the first opportunity to cash in on their admittedly breathtaking virtuosity.
What is novel for Step Up Revolution, though, and what doesn’t quite work, is the attempt to make the lowly genre’s inborn sense of class struggle more overtly political. The film’s missteps are what make the film such a compelling index of Hollywood’s — and by extension its corporate investors’ — perception of public protest in the wake of Occupy. It is not surprising, then, that the protest tactic the Mob most frequently employs is the flash mob, a sensational, camera-ready spectacle that, since its earliest incarnations, has been habitually exploited for commercial purposes.
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Flash mobs appeared in 2003, when the then-editor at Harper’s Bill Wasik (now at Wired) sent out his first anonymous, emailed instructions to New York’s hipster class. “Flash mob” was hastily added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2004 and defined as “a public gathering of complete strangers, organized via the Internet or mobile phone, who perform a pointless act and then disperse again.” Soon, flash mobs were being enacted all over the world, whether for impromptu folk dances, wedding proposals or promotional stunts. Step Up 2: The Streets demonstrates flash mob organizational techniques without naming them as such, though there’s a familiar sense of anticipation as everyone’s phones light up with the location of the evening’s do-or-die dance battle.
Wasik, in his 2006 tell-all confession in Harper’s, cites Howard Rheingold’s concept of “smart mobs” as an inspiration, and certainly organizational tactics that make use of the Internet and mobile phones have effectively convened groups of people together for a variety of political purposes. The very question of the political use of flash mobs seems to have been the preoccupation of Wasik’s moment; his chief concern was commercial co-option that he saw, and dismally documented, in a Ford “Flash Fusion Concert.” Almost a decade later, though, flash mobs are now commonly deployed as political actions, whether by Chilean student activists or Iranian-Americans calling attention to an act of discrimination in an Apple Store; a catalog of flash mob protests has been part of Waging Nonviolence’s archives since its founding in 2009. And there have been darker implications for these forms of gatherings as well, such as the use of BlackBerry Messenger to spread and sustain the London riots in August 2011.
While this legacy renders obsolete the OED’s characterization of flash mobs as “pointless activity,” the question of their real political potency remains. What kind of statement is being made when a Thriller zombie march erupts in the middle of an open-air mall? These impromptu demonstrations at least disrupt the routine of daily life, however momentarily, and that has an implicitly political effect. By staging purposefully non-productive events in public space — space that, as Judith Butler reminds us, is hardly given but must be claimed — flash mobs have a liberating quality, standing in contradiction to the appearance of business as usual. But they also demonstrate how supposedly open, democratic life can be steered toward restrictive, neoliberal ends.
Given its flashy veneer, Step Up Revolution’s take on politics is surprisingly jaundiced, often conveying the feeling of powerlessness borne by the disenfranchised. “It’s easy to feel small — Miami’s a big city,” Sean admits as the camera surveys the city from above. When we first meet him, he’s just a regular guy, earning barely enough to get by. Through the Mob, and through the community he helps to protect, he finds the power of organized activity. By the final sequence, when the dancers rally their neighbors and friends, the result is something larger than the ambitions of any individual, the joy of coming together in a place they precariously claim as home. Flash mob becomes parade — a source of pride, a show of strength and a spectacle that, in the fantasy world of the film, wins the hearts of those who would seek to destroy and redevelop.
It’s a sensational finish, but that’s precisely the problem: Whatever political intent first prompted the performance dissipates into a morass of feel-good inclusiveness. Even the mayor, flanked by saucy señoritas, dances a little salsa. But the momentary victory, the saving of the neighborhood, is swept up in a larger defeat, one that’s all the more devastating for the fact that everyone is still smiling. The fact that Step Up Revolution ends with anything but a revolution doesn’t stem from the tactic of the flash mob per se, but the subsequent corporate buy-out on the gilded wings of Nike. As the philosopher Bernard Stiegler argues, silliness, or the appearance of unseriousness, isn’t the issue — marketing is. Festivities, or what he calls fêtes, are essential to human life. “And yet, the psychotechnologies of the twentieth century have destroyed festivities, because all festivities have become an opportunity for marketing. And so there are no more festivities.”
The revelry inherent in flash mobs, whether the joy of coming together or the act of celebration itself, are ultimately depicted as sales gimmicks designed to produce not political power but corporate integration. Moreover, if you forked over $16 to see the movie in “RealD” like I did, you’re probably all too aware that the film itself is a commodity, and a fairly expensive one at that. Despite Step Up Revolution’s aspirations to radicalism and its heroic politics of assembly, the capitalist engine that structures the entire enterprise barely hiccups before it reclaims the dancers at film’s end. Soon enough, it smoothes itself out, selling ever more tickets in the trademarked name of revolution.
This is a great article and incisive analysis. I do have one quibble, and that is when you mention in passing “divisive and often violent black bloc tactics that emerged in the U.S. during the Seattle World Trade Organization demonstrations in 1999.”
Certainly the black bloc tactics were divisive, and in my view mostly unstrategic, but I’m confused about your characterization of them as violent. Much has been written about the mainstream media’s assessment that the Seattle shutdown was “violent,” and I’m surprised Waging Nonviolence is accepting such a frame. For instance, David Morse wrote in Dissent magazine in 2001:
“First, however, we should examine the origins of the widespread public perception of the Seattle protest as violent, despite a solid body of facts to the contrary. Although the media distorted the original event almost beyond recognition, it is also true that they were fed inflammatory and largely unfounded statements by the badly outnumbered and disorganized Seattle police while the event was still unfolding. An obviously rattled assistant police chief, Ed Joiner, declared at a press conference, ‘These were not peaceful protesters. These were rioters trying to take over the streets of Seattle.’ Joiner’s comment set the tone for the months that followed.”
“No comparable excuse can be offered for the misinformation circulated by police elsewhere. The ‘Molotov cocktail’ cited by D.C. police as a pretext for seizing protesters’ headquarters turned out to be bogus—a plastic bottle containing paint thinner for puppet-making, just as the alleged ‘pepper-spray factory’ turned out to be a communal kitchen.”
“Philadelphia police set up a display of photographs and objects supposedly used by demonstrators in Seattle. The most bizarre item was a chain said to have been tied with gasoline-soaked rags. Police claimed it was ‘similar to the ones used by protesters in Seattle to light on fire and fling over a large crowd.’ This was a complete fabrication. No such devices were reported in Seattle.”
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=1080
David Solnit wrote in the Indypendent in a 2011 retrospective of the Seattle protests:
“‘Protesters throwing Urine’ is one myth of activist violence used by authorities to criminalize protest since Seattle, yet there are no documented cases of this actually happening in Seattle or at other global justice events. This kind of myth is used to create greater public acceptance of the curtailing of civil liberties and the use of violence and repression against protests and participants. Civil liberties advocate David Meieran, of the group Save Our Civil Liberties, explained, ‘This is part of a spectrum of information war strategies that the state uses to repress dissent. “Urine and feces” have to be understood within the larger context of the police’s disinformation about protests and demonstrations. We’ve repeatedly heard the same language used in different cities (“urine and feces,” “not your father’s protesters”).'”
http://www.indypendent.org/2011/12/05/seattle-wto-shutdown-99-to-occupy/
Also see Chris Dixon’s section “Drawing conclusions” in his 1999 writeup, “Five Days in Seattle”:
http://users.resist.ca/%7Echrisd/reflecting/5days.htm
and Rebecca Solnit’s article, “The WTO and the Myth of Activist Violence” from Yes! Magazine:
http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/the-myth-of-activist-violence
I’m sure Waging Nonviolence editors understand better than anyone that what “counts” as violence and nonviolence is an issue over which many activists and theorists disagree. It seems like it would be worthwhile to be specific about what behavior you’re characterizing, even in passing, as violent.
Thanks for this thoughtful comment! We certainly think of terms like “violence” as being in many respects in the eye of the beholder — while we each might have our own opinions about what it means, we don’t have any kind of editorial policy about what counts and what doesn’t. We do make efforts, however, not to follow the typical media practice of ignoring massive state violence while fixating on tiny acts of activist violence.
In the case of black bloc tactics in Seattle, here, since we’re in the realm of cultural criticism, I think it’s fair to speak of “violence” as being a valid characterization of how these things were perceived in the public eye. It’s that impression that the film was banking on in the scene Yue was discussing. And this doesn’t just mean urine and Molotovs — intentionally breaking windows (or, in Step Up, smashing tables), in the eyes of many, counts as violent. I think many people who participated in such things would agree that they were not intending to be entirely nonviolent.
Movements that try to use the moral and performative power of nonviolence against a violent foe cannot simply assume that public audiences already agree with them about what counts as violent and what doesn’t. They have to recognize where their audience is, meet that audience there, and then push the envelope strategically. That said, the kind of historiography you’re pointing to is extremely important — stressing what really did and didn’t happen, and being sober-minded about who the greatest purveyor of violence in a given situation really was.
Thanks Ivan, Nathan, for making these clarifications. Certainly I was limiting my analysis to black bloc aesthetics as they were interpreted by the film, which is to say on the level of representation. It’s no surprise that a thoroughly mainstream film would play upon common (mis)perceptions of protest politics, though your comment reminds me of the somewhat inconsistent manner in which these depictions occur. Watching the film, I was struck by how little difference there was between the “black bloc” episode and the other performances, though the filmmakers clearly tried to draw a distinction (shaming poor Eddy in the process) between them. All of the performances, to some extent, disrupt or tread on quasi-public spaces: a city street, a (fictional and presumably public) museum, a restaurant, an office lobby, a port, etc. Table dancing/stomping occurs in both the gala-crashing scene as well as the restaurant one, and it’s never exactly clear the source of the former’s menace: Is it the gas masks? Is it the black clothing? A relative and highly subjective sense of aggression? Why do the diners at the restaurant react with delight while the gala attendees are immediately frightened?
I don’t have a ready answer here, but I find these questions of what distinguishes entertainment (e.g. “performance art”, or “art for fun”), protest, and terrorism (or what at least involves the threat of physical aggression) interesting, at least as parsed, and obviously inadequately thought out, by the filmmakers. These are almost certainly distortions, but how they work together, and particularly how they don’t, is precisely what the film might tell us about the current state of protest politics in the public imaginary.
Very interesting! Now you’re making me actually want to see it, which is not something I would have thought I’d ever say about a “Step Up” movie.
There’s definitely a compelling question about what, in the writers’ eyes, differentiated those actions (and what, if anything, that reflects in the real world). It’d also be really interesting to try and find similar events that weren’t fictional and see what separated public reaction.
In my experience, it has a lot to do with the cultural preparation — if the public is already “on your side,” they’re willing to support more confrontational (but still nonviolent) tactics, especially if conventional methods of redress like the legislature and judiciary have been exhausted. If the public isn’t on your side, confrontational tactics will be branded as violent, even if they’re firmly in the tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience. And so in the run-up to the Iraq War, in many large cities there were public occupations of major streets (i.e. unpermitted marches) and that didn’t diminish the opposition in those cities to the war. Whereas when the Occupy movement started, there was much less consensus against corporations and capitalism, and so the “violent” label was often quickly applied.
Lots of interesting questions!
I think there is a clear distinction in the performance that they do without Sean and Emily. They come swinging in through windows donning all black and gas masks, which is intimidating in itself, and then smash tables, give people the finger and fight the security guards who come in to stop them.
In contrast at the restaurant you have these attractive, well-dressed people performing a sexy, flirtatious dance for the diners.
This difference gets at the issue of the importance of content, and the relation of form to content in art. The idea that flash mobs as a form are radical in and of themselves is weak, but i think the quote about festivities no longer existing is just not true. You must create art and festivities that are firmly anti-imperialist and then they cannot be co-opted or commercialized.
I get into this more in my review of this film I posted last month:
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/news/all/US/1445/
the big question is: in the american context, seeing how far things have gone in the transformation of democracy into a plutocracy, mind-blowing Inequality, and the immense power that the plutocrats wage, is non-violent confrontation a likely outcome. I hope it is, but I believe that violence is bound to increase in the US, despite the peaceful intentions of the revolutionaries. The plutocrats will not give up without a fight. Hopefully, it will not end in a military dictatorship…
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