The Posthuman Frenzy ofRJ
A grainy close-up of Johnny’s face, taken with an infrared camera, opens the
video. It seems he is being interviewed by an off-screen therapist asking,“Now,
how are you feeling? Are you feeling OK, you feel well?”Johnny merely mum-
bles as a response. He seems both physically and mentally beyond the norms of
the human. He is sitting in a wheel chair and sports an abnormal egg-shaped
head on top of a small face, and seems otherwise feeble and weak. Yet, the
therapist seems to sense that Johnny is capable of perceiving something he him-
self cannot, so he asks:“Are you seeing something...is there something you see
over there? What do you see there, Johnny?”The meeting ends by Johnny hy-
perventilating and the therapist offering him an injection to calm him down. A
transitory sequence starts as a neon light is lit, a rat walks over the logo‘Warp
Film’, a condom is pulled over a dildo and punctured. On the condom is writ-
ten,‘Rubber Johnny,’which in Britain simply is slang for condom.
The punctured condom, with its world of rubber, does not sexualize the vi-
deo as much as its puncture produces a certain attitude. The sexual theme and
an atmosphere of rubber still provides a bizarre undertone in a new close-up of
Johnny’s face as he shows his tongue in a fast equilibrist motion parodying a
standard trope of the porn movie. The movement is spastic and grotesque. It is
produced at an inhuman speed and with a mechanical gestural logic that seems
as robot-like as human, and which thereby evokes an impression of Johnny as a
bizarre cyborg as much as simply deformed.
Johnny’s play with his tongue leads to a peculiar music and dance sequence
which–in contrast to the opening scene–positions him in full control of his
surroundings. The sequence creates a completely new world for him. This is a
world of ferocious speeds and a virtuoso bodily control in complete synch with
the music. In this world, Johnny has mutated to become strong and athletic,
catching and reflecting rays of light coming at him, as if from an attacking en-
emy’s laser weapons in a computer game. He comes across here almost like a
mechanized game character–as someone played as much as playing. The se-
quence is disrupted by someone in a doorway, outside the frame. A character
that could potentially be Johnny’s father addresses him in an aggressive and
demeaning manner. This instantly reverses the mutation to an athlete and re-
constitutes Johnny as a passive, deformed freak under control.
A new sequence radicalizes the video and its exploration of the limits of per-
ception. The sequence is initiated by Johnny sniffing a long stripe of white pow-
der. His body again moves with the music in a frenetic tempo. The at-times-
mechanical body now reveals its organic aspects as the body virtually explodes
into fragments, and is broken down to its constitutive parts: plasma, brain-mass
174 Arild Fetveit