Cringe Movie Download

[Florian Peitz]

Theclip begins. \u201CGangsta\u2019s Paradise\u201D by Coolio (feat. L.V.) comes in on the speakers. A team of NHS ward staff in masks and blue surgical scrubs approaches the camera down a hospital corridor, the footage slowed down so that their footfalls match the opening beats of the song. The lead nurse gestures, rapper-style, her arms outstretched. The clip cuts abruptly at the end of Coolio\u2019s first line, after the word \u201Cdeath.\u201D

A second clip. In this one, a group of young men, evidently in their twenties or early thirties, go through a pair of wooden double-doors. A couple of them carry American flags. Others wear brand-new-looking red MAGA hats, the \u201C45\u201D representing former president Donald Trump standing out in white above their ears. \u201CIs this the Senate?\u201D, one of them asks uncertainly. Later in the clip, Jake Angeli, the \u201CQAnon Shaman\u201D whose painted face and cartoonish outfit would become the dominant meme of the day\u2019s events, can be glimpsed on the balcony above the Senate floor, jumping up and down in an apparent attempt to maintain energy.

A third clip. Stephen Colbert, midway through a 10-minute YouTube compilation of \u201CVax-Scene\u201D segment intros from The Late Show, bops quietly in his chair to a pastiche of Color Me Badd\u2019s \u201CI Wanna Sex You Up\u201D as animated versions of the band\u2014reimagined as COVID-vaccine syringes\u2014briefly cavort at the bottom of the screen. The lyrics appear in a chyron (all in caps, naturally): \u201CI WANNA VAX YOU UP. QUICK SHOT IN YOUR ARM NOW.\u201D The music quickly fades out. As though acknowledging the insubstantiality of the joke, Colbert gurns in mock embarrassment (or perhaps in genuine self-amusement), announcing to the camera, \u201Cno need to have a definite ending to any of these.\u201D

Depending on one\u2019s political orientation, elements within any or all of these tableaux could be labelled \u201Ccringe.\u201D Cringe is a display of high awkwardness that can often generate an intense feeling of second-hand embarrassment\u2014or even shame\u2014in having witnessed it.1 Above all, however, cringe is undignified. It seems to have no inward dimension, involving instead the unfiltered outward projection of narcissistic fantasy, naivet\u00E9, or impulse. In the January 6 footage, an increasingly agitated young man rifles through what seems to be a sheaf of abandoned Senate committee papers, saying, \u201Cthere\u2019s gotta be something here we can use against them.\u201D In this moment, a set of fantasies about power and where it resides appears to collapse in real time when faced with the banal and obfuscatory nature of everyday bureaucratic language and procedure. Cringe, then, often incorporates a strong element of self-abasement. When synchronised or taken up en masse within crowds or political movements, this kind of behaviour assumes an almost uncanny dimension. Commenting on what he called some of the more extreme \u201Corgiastic, quasi-religious\u201D displays of ritualistic synchronised emotion during the Summer 2020 protests, Matt Taibbi suggested that their cumulative effect was so \u201Cdeeply weird\u201D as to essentially \u201Cparalyse\u201D mainstream press commentary.2 Events of this sort can therefore act like dazzle camouflage, leaving onlookers in a state of immobilising aesthetic confusion that circumvents any attempt to rationally assess what they might mean.

While, for some witnesses, cringe can generate a strong desire to look away\u2014to pretend that none of this is actually happening\u2014for others, it can invoke an almost magnetic fascination. There can be an impulse to collect and curate cringe, as with the r/cringe and r/cringepics subreddits. When the divisions between competing aesthetic regimes appear to demarcate a political boundary, this collecting and commentating urge can be stronger still. For many conservative social media users, such as the reply-guys who comment on the Libs of TikTok Twitter account, critique often amounts to little more than identifying the existence of stereotypically \u201Cprogressive\u201D aesthetics. In this mode, personal attributes\u2014\u201Cblue hair\u201D or \u201Cpronouns in bio\u201D\u2014become forms of diagnosis that are assumed to disqualify the aesthetically tagged individual from being taken seriously. Far-right commentators Lauren Southern and Katie Hopkins both used the \u201Cdancing TikTok nurses\u201D craze of 2020\u20131 as a means of targeting the political establishment (and bolstering their own \u201Cdissident\u201D brands). In their response videos, the spectacle of gyrating surgical staff symbolises what they represent as the hypocritical and unserious nature of the pandemic response itself. As these responses indicate, \u201Ccringe\u201D is not simply an involuntary physiological response to external stimuli. To label something cringe is also often a political move\u2014a form of social classification that aims, above all, to invalidate.

At the same time, however, there is an escalatory and mimetic quality to these exchanges. Cringe has a way of forcing others to play by its own rules, to be caught up within the cringe dialectic. There is something in the outrageousness and lack of proportion involved in \u201Ccringeworthy\u201D spectacles that appears to demand a correspondingly outsized response. Responses to cringe (even, or perhaps especially, those that believe themselves to be \u201Cbased\u201D) thereby often become \u201Ccringe\u201D in themselves. Writing about the first anniversary of January 6 in the Psychiatric Times, H. Steven Moffic diagnosed a society-wide condition he called \u201Canniversary trauma.\u201D3 The only way of solving the problem of \u201Cthe Capitol event and all its supporters,\u201D he wrote, would be the political equivalent of involuntary psychiatric commitment. Once subjected to this form of therapeutic treatment, \u201Cthe Capitol opposition will eventually conclude that repentance was needed\u201D for its own \u201Crecovery.\u201D Moffic then imagined that this opposition might, like some of his own former patients, end up \u201Cthanking\u201D their political opponents for their timely intervention.4 While the official events commemorating the first anniversary of 9/11 had largely followed traditional, twentieth-century modes of commemoration, with carefully observed minutes of silence, the 6/1 official anniversary programme included a live performance of \u201CDear Theodosia\u201D by members of the Broadway cast of Hamilton, introduced by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Simultaneously observing both the anniversary itself and COVID-19 sanitary protocols, this was what Paul Virilio might have called an \u201Coptically correct\u201D performance.5 All participants beamed in virtually, occupying their own hermetically sealed, socially distanced screens. Rather than seeking to project a sense of national unity, as the commemorative logic that structured the 2002 9/11 ceremony did, the 2022 6/1 ceremony seemed designed to project faction. The response to the aesthetic provocations of the January 6 Capitol incursion\u2014the MAGA hats; the inappropriate use of lecterns; Angeli\u2019s artfully displayed body with its highly \u201Cproblematic\u201D Nordic-themed tattoos\u2014here takes the form of an aesthetic counter-provocation, one that abandons traditional commemorative ritual in favour of the contemporary (but tribally identified) middlebrow. In placing that totem of liberal-progressive-nerd cultural identity, Hamilton, at centre-stage, this was a programming move seemingly calculated to generate as many \u201Cdislikes\u201D from ideological opponents as \u201Clikes\u201D from the like-minded.

Much of what is described as \u201Ccringe\u201D online could fit within the wider remit of kitsch. As Thorsten Botz-Bornstein defines it in The New Aesthetics of Deculturation, kitsch is \u201Ca tasteless copy of an existing style or the systematic display of bad taste or artistic deficiency,\u201D often accompanied by \u201Can exaggerated sentimentality, banality, superficiality, or triteness.\u201D6 More than a quality that inheres within specific art objects, however, kitsch can also act as a kind of \u201Ccultural structure.\u201D It is a mode of cultural production that normalises \u201Cformulaic\u201D thought, behaviour, and language, exaggerated statements and expressions, and a pervasive sense of \u201Cinappropriateness.\u201D7 Above all, Botz-Bornstein suggests, the cultural structure of kitsch encourages the production of simplified truths and stylised realities. Its proponents base their claims to authority on emotivism, compressed and simplistic slogans that deliberately eschew nuance or complexity, and inappropriately intrusive expressions of personal sentiment. In a milieu governed by the dictates of kitsch, believing in these kinds of \u201Cabsolute truths\u201D is a moral necessity, and the dominant affect can be disconcertingly ingenuous and infantilising. The \u201Creality\u201D projected by kitsch\u2019s simulation is accordingly reminiscent of the religious sect or the classroom. At the same time, kitsch governance often likes to conceal its coercive nature in displays of cute or self-consciously \u201Charmless\u201D aesthetics, expressions of mildness or benevolence, or appeals to the greater good.8

Seen through this interpretive lens, many of the aesthetic and communicative phenomena of the Trump and COVID periods resolve into expressions of kitsch. There\u2019s the MAGA cap, with its inappropriate melding of leisurewear functionality, sports fandom, and political signification. Colbert\u2019s \u201CVax-Scene\u201D intro-segments, with their jarringly inappropriate juxtaposition of propagandistically repetitive and simplified public health messaging, garish cartoon imagery, and self-consciously terrible musical choices, all overseen by the \u201Ccute,\u201D gurning visage of Colbert himself. The formal, repetitive, childlike recitation of honorific titles like \u201CDr Fauci\u201D on all major news channels. The barely concealed revenge fantasy evident in Moffic\u2019s 1/6 anniversary pieces, in which his political enemies are reduced to the status of involuntarily sectioned psychiatric in-patients, the levels of kitsch simplification heightened by a passive-aggressive and outwardly \u201Ccaring\u201D language of healing and benevolent therapeutics, and sanctioned by the self-serving fantasy of retrospective consent and gratitude.

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