The culture of the Everyman is distilled from myriad sources. Its genes are drawn from times and places often unknown to us, it’s genealogy difficult to parse even under ideal conditions. Yet the dominant forces guiding its development, stirring its progress, and shaping its minds usually feel obvious in the context of daily lives. SHOP: A Pop Opera is a study and commentary on one of the most important of these forces: scientific rationalism.
Through scientific rationalism we have learned to take the world as a given- to treat the world as known. It is thus sometimes hard to imagine what the word “mystery” means in these times. Of course, we acknowledge that there remain things unknown, but rarely do we imagine them to be unknowable. When the world is considered as an abstract force, an unstructured mass beyond comprehension, it’s presentation as such generally follows a handful of generic forms.
We have the unknowable as nemesis (Bloodborne, for example), in which the protagonist is forced to reckon with the Lovecraftian forms. We now know well the image of the hero as insignificant, the tragic hero brutalized by an immense and uncaring world. These depictions are often rooted in narratives where hubris and human centrality in the universe is shattered by external, uncontrollable, and inevitable forces. It hardly needs to be remarked the relationship between this form and the experience of the 20th century, during which global war, revolutionary technologies, and revelations of physical sciences eroded human confidence in its own centrality to the world. It is perhaps appropriate to call this technical horror, the horror of displacement from one’s own story, the horror of scientific man. This form of the unknown, when depicted in media, captures our sense of dread at the world’s complexity and uncertainty.
Next, we have the unknowable as pathologic (Donnie Darko, or Requiem for a Dream). This form is also frequently depicted as horror, perhaps betraying our steadfast commitment to the rationalism embedded in our culture and our entire conception of life. In this form, the audience is severed from the real as the protagonist loses touch with the external world through inherent, generally mental defect. This can also take the form of quasi-pathologic character defect, as in Notes from the Underground or American Psycho. Each of these examples pits the protagonist against themselves and their inability to relate in regular, rational, and normative terms with either the physical or social worlds. These are better described as anti-hero stories; the audience watches in horror as the “sick” individual unleashes uncertainty, chaos, and the unknown into orderly, rational society, feeling only reserved empathy for the struggling protagonist (antagonist) as they wrestle with life’s quandaries. The obvious prototype for these works is Crime and Punishment, though the antecedent works mentioned above have significantly refined the form.
A notable third form of the unknowable is presented as demonic (The Exorcist). This is perhaps less complex than the others; it is an ancient form, as old as Gilgamesh and even older still. In these stories we find humanity beset by the supernatural sovereign, who bends the world beyond the bounds of reason and intervenes in human affairs for the purpose of destruction. This depiction shares numerous similarities with the unknown as nemesis but is different in that demonic depictions of the unknowable are in general truly “supernatural” forces as opposed to the naturalized and scientific “Lovecraftian” unknown, the “nemesis” depiction which poses the unknown as stemming or resultant from human action. Today these are rooted in Christian themes, as opposed to the atheist or agnostic accounts of “nemesis”.
In each of these general forms (I recognize well that these are not exhaustive), the unknown is presented as a source of tension and danger for the humans who encounter it. It is always the return to scientific, rational thinking and normalcy which is presented as redemptive in these narratives.
I know this sounds like a meme, but allow me to propose Jack Stauber’s SHOP: A Pop Opera as a radically different form of the unknowable: the unknowable as redemptive.
SHOP is the story of the Everyman interacting with the mundane. It is an American story, a narrative presented in the most boring, average, ordinary, rational, calculated, scientific locale of our daily life: the grocery store. It explores the Everyman’s interactions with well-known contemporary social archetypes defined by aspects of scientific rationality. SHOP explains how our relationship with the abstract, uncertain, incalculable, unknowable world of ideas and emotions redeems personal life (and by extension social life) from the pitfalls of scientific rationalism. And it does so through song.
First, let us consider the grocery store in greater detail. The grocery store is presented as the locale of rationalist thought. Upon entering the local grocer, one is assaulted immediately with an entire universe of metrics: prices, weights, nutritional values, percentages “off” and “additional”, supplemental figures, specialty certifications, expiration dates, appeals to amounts sold, time-specific deals, and a variety of whatever other interesting numbers one might find on a shopping trip. SHOP’s world of metrics includes the “expired” milk, “12 nut artisanal vitamin” bread, “mass produced” sponges, “100 pack” oatmeal, “DECAF” coffee, and the endless variety and selection of cheese for sale. These metrics are not of any interest by themselves, of course. Rather, they serve as a vehicle for Stauber to explore the impact of witnessing and believing in these metrics on the human personality.
Almost all Stauber’s characters are acolytes of the grocery store; they both sustain and are sustained by the narratives presented within. They are believers in metrics, adherents to the rational social order suggested by these products. And, as such, they feel awfully familiar, for we sustain and are sustained by the grocery store as well. Stauber’s critique is, in this fashion, only an extension of his experience and full integration with the metrics, characters, and experiences presented in SHOP. Remember: this is the story of the Everyman. This is the story of you and me.
SHOP’s character’s have been impacted by the grocery store and the life that comes with it in a variety of ways. The Everyman encounters the “hipster” archetype – an expression of the relationship between scientific rationalism and class. The “hipster”, in rattling off about artisanal bread and “mid-century” walnut auctions, exemplifies how belief in the rational can in fact be deceptive, how exposure to it extends mathematical reasoning into situations in which it is wholly inappropriate. The “hipster” goes on to explain how the bread is in fact inedible, and appeals to an even higher metric of quality, the bread from another luxury shop in town.
Stauber, rejecting the rational, embraces the unknowable as a method of dealing with these feelings. He uses the deeply personal faculty of interpretation to engage with the world of abstract ideas, open-ended questioning, and emotive response. He leaps off the word “artisanal” into song, asking “What’s an artisanal me? /Where do my clothes end? / Can I stop then?/ Which ones are my artisanal friends?”. Here the Everyman questions the meaning and applicability of quality metrics in relation to our personal lives. Of course these questions are non-sensical! Such aspects of lives are unknowable, and they are better not to be known. For what can it possibly mean to have an artisanal friend? For that matter, what in fact can it mean to have an artisanal bread?
And it is important too that he does it in song: SHOP could only be a pop opera. For he does not express this sentiment in terms of an argument, laid out piece by piece; he expresses it in the art that unstructured human feeling inherently is. As the video shifts seamlessly through Claymation, 2D animation, 3D animation, and real footage, the audience is exposed to something like the free flow of ideas inside the human mind. In this sequence and those following, the regular world is entirely discarded for non-rational, impressionistic sequences of images and film. This is the unknown into which we must dive and draw from in order to deal with the world as human beings – it is the world inside of ourselves.
Perhaps the most striking example of the impact of scientific rationality on human behavior is presented in the “schedule man”, who complains that bumping into the Everyman’s cart has derailed his dinner plans several days in the future. As the man jitters and jerks, he explains that he has even attempted to plan time into his schedule for accidents- yet hasn’t had enough time. In this character we find the very inverse of the regular presentation: here we find the rational as pathologic. And indeed, this is an insight to which we can all assent, given the predominance of pop-media covering Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and those who suffer from it. In some sense this character presents the foil to Stauber’s Everyman – he is the completely rational, regular, “metricized” man whose very identity is defined by the logic of the grocery store.
Again returning to the redemptive qualities of the unknown, the Everyman burst again into song, this time broadly considering the routine of every day life. Stauber considers the possibility of entering into a bland, uniform “oatmeal routine”, where “Everyday/ My oatmeal routine/ Time is my master/ Keep everything clean”. With this final stanza, the Everyman is abruptly transformed into a zombie-like figure, and images of chaos and disaster fill the screen. Despite that “Life would have rhythm/ and maybe harmony, the Everyman considers that “Circumstance/ the Unexpected” are inevitable in life and concludes that it is living freely which empowers the Everyman to adapt to the world’s changes.
While there are several other interesting examples presented in this 12-minute video, they speak with a uniform voice. SHOP puts us in the belly of the beast- the most logical locale of all- and places the characters of our lives on display for examination. I suggest that this work offers us an unusual example of a media form presenting the unknown as redemptive. Stauber climbs the signs and symbols of rational existence – metrics of quality, dates of expiration – down into the Jungian world of impulse and idea, dressing it in the uniquely personal and human mode of song and dance. It is an immensely interesting and important work which I would recommend heartily to all, acolytes of the grocery store as we are.
Diogenes
Staff Writer at The Papermaker