Most commercials these days aren’t worth a first glance. But earlier this year, D&G Time launched a heavily rotated global campaign directed by Hype Williams that was definitely worth a second (watch it in the right-hand column under BONUSES). If you looked hard enough, you could see right into the mirrored heart of the 21st century -a ‘new’ century that is now nearly a decade old, and soon to move into its teens. Not since the Levi’s male striptease ads of the 80s (remember Nick Kamen ?) has there been an ad that summed / summoned up an era.First time, you see an attractive young man and woman in tasty D&G eveningwear checking their D&G watches anxiously, hurrying across different sides of the sexy night-time metropolis to hook up with one another, to the urgent, techno sounds of Stylophonics’ “R U Experienced ?” (dance music for people who want to listen to tomorrow’s music today !). Finally they arrive breathless at their meeting place. But rather than rushing into each other’s arms, they ignore one another and instead clinch and kiss a same-sex partner that turns up at the last minute.
So those naughty people at D&G flirt with shocking, or at least surprising, homosexuality again, coolly wrong-footing our heterosexist assumptions -or ramming gayness down our throats. Either way, this seems to be the ad that most people saw. In other words, most people watched it only once. Watching it again, paying attention this time, you realize that the ‘same-sexuality’ of D&G goes much deeper -and is much more shocking. So much so you can understand why people wanted to see just reassuring homosexuality -even homophobes. Second time, you notice that the same-sex couples are in fact… the same. Twins. Clones. Mirror images. These latter-day Echo and Narcissus are, like many if not most of us these days, on a hot date with themselves. Or at least, a hot, idealized D&G version of themselves. No wonder they’re in such a hurry.
What’s more, D&G -and this is looking more and more like the D&G century- has the effrontery not only to ram down your throat what consumer and celebrity culture today is all about (but of course usually goes out of its way to deny and disguise), it also does it in such a way that feels and looks entirely natural, entirely appropriate. The lack of shame about rotating around yourself is perhaps the most eye-catching thing of all. Only the Italians could get away with it.What, then, is D&G Time ? What is the era, the epoch it heralds and meters so accurately, so tastefully ? Well, a cloned, digital world in which the driving force, the coiled spring at the heart of the jeweled mechanism, is not heterosexual reproduction, or even homosexual coupling, but rather, narcissistic perfection. Narcissistic perfection achieved through fashion, consumption, cosmetics, technology, surgery and really good lighting. A utopian-dystopian, twinsome future that has already arrived. Dance music for people who want to listen to tomorrow’s music today.
The brazen auto-strumpetry of D&G broadcasts that narcissism is no longer a pathological condition -it’s the contemporary condition. That is to say, it’s no more pathological today than desire itself -since narcissism and desire are much the same thing, particularly since we’re now surrounded by such shiny, pretty accessories as D&G jewelry.
The triumph of metrosexuality has seen to that. Contrary to what you may have heard, metrosexuality is not about feminized males -or even about straight men acting gay. To talk in such terms is merely to revel yourself as a hopeless nostalgic. Metrosexuality isn’t about men becoming women, or becoming gay, it’s about men becoming everything. To themselves. In much the same way that women have been for some time.
At the beginning of the Noughties, the metrosexual was someone who might be officially gay, straight or even bi, but this was utterly immaterial as he took himself as his own love-object and pleasure as his sexual preference. The metrosexual was the beginning of the end of sexuality, the 19th-century pseudo-science that claimed that your personality and psychology and taste in home furnishings was dictated by whether or not your bed-partner’s genitalia were the same shape as yours.
As we approach the Teenies, this process, with a flush of hormones, has been speeded up : D&G Time is neither gay, het or bi or even metro. It’s simply same-sexuality. Clonosexuality. In D&G Time, all genitalia are the same shape : fashion-shaped. In place of the Œdipal military-industrial complex of the 20th century we have… the all-consuming Narcissus Complex of the 21st.
We live, you can hardly failed to have noticed, in an age of Dorian Grays, male and female, admiring themselves in webcams, phone cams, digicams, multi online profiles and the 2-way mirrors of the global Big Brother House. There may or may not be a portrait in the attic but if there is, you can be sure that it’s been Photoshopped. Back in the 20th century -which seems much, much longer than just a decade ago- the definition of a transsexual was someone who behaved as if they were being photographed 24 hours a day. Now, of course, this is how everyone under 30 behaves. Because they are. As the young Quentin Crisp, a reality TV winner long before there was such a thing as reality TV responded prophetically to his starchy father’s angry accusation :-Do you intend to spend the rest of your lefe admiring yourself in the mirror ?
-If I possibly can.
Whatever you or I may think of narcissism -and Gore Vidal famously described a narcissist as “some better looking than you”- it’s far, far too late for an opinion. After a century of very bad press indeed, narcissism now holds the (nicely turned) whip-handle over the culture. Even politics, always the last to know, has noticed : a former male beauty pageant winner is the Governator of California.
Safely on the other side of the 20th century, we can see that at the end of the 19th century, Dorian’s dad, the first celeb, Oscar While, wasn’t punished for his homosexuality so much as his narcissism. Wilde the aesthete may have been jailed for sex with males, shortly after the word homosexual was coined, becoming its most famous exemplar, but it was his vanity that had sentenced him in the minds of many Victorians, long before his trial.“Have you ever adored a young man madly ?”, he was asked in the witness box. Wilde parried, quite truthfully : “I have never given adoration to anyone but myself”. You could have heard a cologne-soaked silk handkerchief drop. A line that would have worked perfectly in a comedy of manners in a West End theatre fell ominously flat in the courtroom. No wonder he was found guilty of “gross indecency” and given four years’ hard labor -a fitting punishment for idle self-contemplation in Victorian England. An England that persisted, of course, for much of the 20th century.
For that other 19th century celebrity, Sigmund Freud, narcissism was a necessary and healthy part of childhood, but one that must be abandoned to reach full adulthood (remember that ?). This explained, he wrote, the fascination that children, humorists, criminals and anyone who holds on to their self-contentment and inaccessibility represent for us (Wilde was of course all three). He could also have added women to that list, since women were expected to hold onto their narcissism -and use it to attract men. Heterosexuality was based on this Victorian division of sexual labor -as this division broke down in the latter part of the 20th century, heterosexuality was, as we know, eventually itself phased out by the 21st (the very innovations which have helped free women from domestic drudgery, the pill, washing machines –in that order- have also freed men from… women).For Freud, the universal Œdipus Complex was the principal way in which boys became men. Today by contrast, the universal Narcissus Complex is the way in which boys become… prettier boys. Vanity, thy name is Man. Narcissus was warned by Tiresias the blind transsexual seer that he would live a long life so long as he didn’t know himself. As poor old Œdipus found out when he consulted him, Tiresias’ prophecies, although always accurate, weren’t exactly helpful. Narcissus doesn’t know at first that the handsome image in the pool he falls in love with is himself (in other words, Narcissus isn’t very narcissistic). It’s only when he does that he dies of despair, knowing that he can never possess himself.
The original Narcissus myth has been misrepresented for much of the last hundred years as a cautionary tale about the pathology of male beauty. In fact, it was a warning to beautiful youths to be more generous with their looks -to both sexes. Sodom and Gomorrah in reverse. Narcissus is not doomed by his own beauty but by his thoughtless spurning of various suitors, male and female. One cruelly rejected youth prays to Nemesis that Narcissus should know what it is to love without hope. Nemesis, the goddess of revenge, assents and arranges for Narcissus to be punished for being so hoity-toity by ensnaring him with his own looks.It’s a lesson that seems to have been instinctively learnd by today’s tarty youths. Success is something for the heroically narcissistic and exhibitionistic, those who make themselves constantly available for our love, on TV, at the cinema, on billboards and in glossies. Or emerging glistening and groomed from the roof of a red double-decker bus at the Olympics to the strains of “Whole lotta Love”, showing a wildly cheering world their latest cosmetic surgery.
Today, narcissism is not abandoned, of course, but cultivated. From Britanny to Čechy , all over the world. It’s an industry. No wonder Oscar Wilde has been so rehabilitated to the point where he and Freddie Mercury are to all intents and purposes the same person. Today, children, humorists, criminals and footballers are not merely envied, they are emulated. We are encouraged (compelled ?) to mistake them / recognize them for our own idealized reflection (this is no doubt the point at which I should quote smoke’n’mirror-phase Jacques Lacan’s only real achievement was to turn lucid Freudianism into self-regarding Gallic metaphysics).
The calculated childishness of consumerism makes this not only possible but necessary -since it is the very basis of our global economy. This is why 21st-century narcissism is not a form of contentment but rather of endless desiring. The Narcissus Complex is the romance of the endless perfectibility of ourselves proffered by the smoked high street changing-room mirrors of a mediated world -the irresistible lure of a hyperreal twinsome version of ourselves. What the entire history of human culture turns out to have been working towards.Before his own doom, Oscar Wilde wrote a prose poem called “The Disciple” which played with the story in a typically Wildean inverted fashion. Some Oreads grieving for Narcissus come across the pool and ask it to tell them about Narcissus’ famed beauty. The pool replies that it has no idea how beautiful Narcissus was. The Oreads are baffled : “Who should know better than you ?”. “But I loved Narcissus because”, replied the pool, “as he lay on my banks and looked down on me, in the mirror of his eyes I saw my own beauty mirrored”.
As Oscar Wilde wrote in the preface to his Narcissus novel, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, which has proved as timeless as Dorian’s looks : “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors”.
D&G, however, have mirrored both.
