An updated version of a very intelligent documentary by Sut Jhally on sexuality in music videos has been released by the Media Education Foundation (MEF): Dreamworlds 3: Desire, Sex, and Power in Music Video, (updated from Dreamworlds 2 [1995] and Dreamworlds [1991]).

(The website notes that a shorter, 35-minute abridgment, "with less nudity & profanity," would be better for high school audiences. That version, Dreamworlds 3: Abridged, completed at the end of 2007, is now also available.)

I was a touch skeptical as I walked into the showing of Sut Jhally’s Dreamworlds 3: Desire, Sex & Power in Music Video, the first documentary distributed by the Media Education Foundation (MEF) that I would have seen. I was afraid I was going to walk into an hour-long puritanical sermon about the evils of sex, the rule of “liberal media,” or the moral decline of America, the Beautiful. The sort of thing I have in mind comes up again and again in discussions of the so-called “culture wars.”

An especially disingenuous presentation of the “concern” with inter alia the objectification of women in rap videos could be seen in Bernard Goldberg’s comments when Jon Stewart interviewed him about his new book, 100 People Who are Screwing Up America (now updated to 110 People Who Are Screwing Up America--and Al Franken is #37) in the summer of 2005 on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show—VIDEO available here: Jon Stewart schools Bernard Goldberg. It should be noted that, by mentioning right-wingers, I am not denying that feminists of a certain stripe can also issue a blanket condemnation of sex--indeed, that was my other guess as to what I'd be seeing if the documentary weren't a "culture wars" attack on the "liberal media."

What I got instead was an effective, surprisingly intelligent meditation on the severely limited and limiting images of women (and men) in the reigning music videos.

The main point of the documentary (very effectively backed up by countless clips from all over the field) is that the images of women (and men) across the board in MTV/BTE (etc.) music videos reduces them to only one small part of their total humanity: their sexuality—for men, insofar as they can buy, sell, trade, control, and conquer women, and women, insofar as they have only one goal: to serve men as objects of consumption.

Again—to make this perfectly clear—Dreamworlds 3 did not make this charge on the basis of a puritanical, anti-sex worldview. Indeed, the documentary went out of its way to clarify that the point was not that sexuality, in particular female sexuality, is evil or harmful in itself. The film made it clear that, in the right context, everyone (and women in particular) should be allowed to have sexual lives, express their sexuality, and fulfill their sexual needs. Merely—and this was the central point—the music videos served up by the reigning music industry effectively present no other side of women than their sexuality. It did refer often to the “pornographic” imaginary, but not, it seemed to me, because it wanted to attack pornography per se; rather, its complaint was that music industry videos seem incapable of operating anywhere else.

As one watched the film, which consisted mostly of voiceovers running through music video clips (see the clip of Dreamworlds 3, below), one saw the depressing sameness, the crushing monotony of music videos. And that sameness requires that women always and everywhere serve to add sexual spice, or rather the sexual main course. As the documentary pointed out, there are so many other aspects of the human being, of life itself, and these find practically no expression or representation in music videos. In particular, women as intellectual beings, beings capable of nobility, of creativity, of political action, hardly exist in the pornographic “dreamworld” of music video.

Dreamworlds 3 points out that the images of black men in the leading rap videos bear a frightening similarity to the images one saw in the pro-KKK movie, Birth of a Nation. They bear a great resemblance, therefore, to the images of racist propaganda, and almost no resemblance to the majority of black men, let alone the great variety one can find among them. It also pointed out—I was glad to see—that these videos are the products of large, powerful corporations run by rich men whose goal is simply to make more money, and thus have little reason to present a more human vision of black people. (Jhally points out that these are usually rich white men who have little connection to the black men their music videos are representing. I wonder if their indifference to the wider humanity of black people results perhaps less from these corporate leaders being white than from their positions in large corporations and their investment in masculinity—but it is not easy to write off racism completely.) Dreamworlds 3 also touches on the spread of rap music into the wider culture, and provides a clip of a young white man in a car, being interviewed about the rap music he listens to: he blithely responds (this is from memory, not a transcript), “I like learning about colored people.” The interviewer incredulously asks, “Did you just say, colored people?”

In sum, Dreamworlds 3 was effective and—for all the wearying monotony presented in the music video clips that make up most of what we see in it—nuanced.

If I had any complaints, it would be that the film didn’t really spend much time discussing the causes of this dreary regularity in music videos, merely its effects. For, as I watched clip after clip after clip of women pole-dancing, prancing around in bondage or nurse uniforms or schoolgirl getups or randy policewomen outfits, what came to my mind was the boring monotony of top-40/“K”-rock radio, with its mind-numbing, never-ending heavy rotation format—and the alternative to that: independent, community radio, such as the incredibly diverse and sometimes wonderfully strange offerings of WFMU in New Jersey (listener-supported, commercial-free alternative radio, also available online at their website, with live streaming audio as well as archives of most of their shows). In the end, it seems to me, the real explanation for this monotony is the monopolization of the media in general by an ever-smaller number of corporations.

One sign of this homogenization which the documentary did touch on throughout was the fact that the ever-repeated sexualized female—the inescapable formula into which any successful musician must squeeze—is found across the board: not just rap music videos, but hard rock music videos (where indeed, the documentary shows this pornographic imaginary really began), pop rock videos, and country music videos. Clips shown were almost always chosen from across the genres. And it is precisely the pressure from the monopolizing music companies that cuts all music videos to the same pattern. In its defense, judging from its website, the MEF could counter that it already offers documentaries which deal with the problems of media monopolization and control, but it would have helped Dreamworlds 3, I think, if a little more time had been devoted to this—the all-important economic context for the monotony in question (as I noted before, this was touched on when the documentary briefly discussed the question of who runs the leading music companies).

As for the question—what is the effect of these videos on young men and women—one aspect of the question was left essentially without comment, namely, how do people consume these videos? A remark which the video did not make (that I can remember), but which would have been perfectly consistent with its general thesis, would be that it is not that young people are simply passive consumers, powerless “blank slates” before the television screen, but rather that, given practically no other images of women and men, it is harder for them to imagine other possibilities. It is, after all, much easier to reproduce and use ideas which one receives than to come up with new ideas on one's own. And it is for this reason that the monotony discussed (and ably demonstrated) in Dreamworlds 3 is so worrisome.

The great variety of the internet might be seen as a solution to this monopolization, but that variety, too, is threatened from a number of directions. Most important as I write are legislative attacks on net neutrality (see inter alia the Save the Internet website / short video here). At the same time, even if net neutrality manages to be preserved, if young web surfers already have their tastes defined by the music industry when they visit YouTube , they will more probably look for more of the same: women as nothing but tits and ass, and men as nothing but rulers in the meat market.

[This review has been updated and revised a number of times since it was first posted.]

ASIDE (Pricing): The film is expensive--the price is its one serious drawback for the individual viewer. It is aimed at those who can rent it in order to show it to groups, on campuses, etc. (As of Nov 19, 2007, it lists two prices: $250 for colleges and universities, and $150 for high schools and non-profits.) It was at just such a public showing that I saw the documentary myself.

ADDITIONAL REVIEWS of Dreamworlds 3:

Review by Dan DiLandro for Educational Media Reviews Online [EMRO] (Dec. 4, 2007)

C. E. Emmer teaches philosophy in Kansas, but writes for multitude.tv as a world citizen. Within the academy, he writes on 18th-century aesthetics and on things called "kitsch." As a world citizen, he tends to write about human rights issues, but is also interested in the media, art and the artworld, documentaries, and a 'multitude' of other cultural topics.