Sightings
December 20, 2007
Trangressive Irony at Radio City
— Travis Scholl
Editor's Note: Sightings will return in the new year, on Monday, January 7.
At this time of year American culture is laden with customs, themselves
laden with multivariant meanings. The Christmas Spectacular that takes
place every year at Radio City Music Hall, for example, comes with its
own set of traditions. The stunning simultaneity of the Rockettes' high
leg kicks…the complex choreography of the Wooden Soldiers…the condensed
retelling of the Nutcracker story—most of the elements of Radio City's
Christmas Spectacular, now in its seventy-fifth year, are told year after
year, only with different choreography and new sets.
Near the end of each year's Spectacular, another tradition takes place:
the "Living Nativity," in which, as the program notes tell us,
the "beautiful and inspiring story of the first Christmas [is] told
reverently in pageantry, music, and scripture." It features multiple
set tableaus, live animals, and swelling musical orchestration; but perhaps
the most notable component of this particular scene, as I observed it
over Thanksgiving weekend, was in the audience response to it. As soon
as the curtain pulled back to reveal the full set of the nativity, the
stage began to sparkle with the strobing flashes of camera bulbs. It was
the one and only point at which the audience was willing to transgress
the venue's explicit rule to not take flash photographs.
It has been about twenty-five years since the French philosopher Jean-Francois
Lyotard characterized postmodernity as "incredulity toward metanarratives."
His definition relied on the distinction between (big) metanarratives,
which tend to dominate whole systems of meaning, and (small) narratives,
which provide more organic meanings within existential realities. But
what Lyotard's distinction does not necessarily take into account is the
way that cultural narratives, even religious narratives, can be inverted
upon and into each other. In a postmodern context where popular culture
is inundated by spectacle, religious narratives, most often presumed to
function as metanarrative, can be inverted, taking the form of smaller
narratives within other systems of meaning. At Radio City , the Spectacular's
own metanarrative could have been summarized by the production's oft-repeated
encouragement "to believe in the magic of Christmas," supported
by its signature lyric to "let Christmas shine." As such, the
narrative of the Christ child—which took up all of about twelve minutes
of an almost two hour show—was subsumed within the larger narrative of
the Spectacular's more recognizable emcee, Santa Claus.
In most cases, such inversions become instances of those most famous of
postmodern events; they become transgressive instances of irony. The irony
of what happened at Radio City worked through a kind of double inversion:
The production inverted the nativity narrative within its much larger
spectacle, but audience members displayed their own inversions of what
they were seeing by transgressing the rules for (non)participation and
pulling out their cameras at what was staged as perhaps one of the least
"spectacular" moments of the show.
This holiday season will surely provide countless opportunities for talking
heads to argue over public displays of religion; and just as surely, each
display will open itself to its own potential transgression into irony,
where discourse becomes spectacle, where the spectacle is in the eye of
the beholder, and where one person's metanarrative is, for another, just
a fat man in a red suit. I saw it happen at Radio City Music Hall on Thanksgiving
Day. The irony came in a flash. And it left just as quickly, lost in the
3D metanarrative of magic and exhibition that is New York City—and twenty-first
century America—at Christmastime.
Travis J. Scholl is a recent graduate of Yale University Divinity School
and Managing Editor of Theological Publications at Concordia Seminary,
St. Louis.
Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
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