The New Life

The New Life, that may or may not be a deliberate reference to the book by the photographer Diane Arbus, and La Baguette are at first sight apparently clumsy wrestling matches between two men in a closed space. They attack each other but their duel is obviously staged and, thanks to the friendly looking slow motion movements of the characters, it hardly looks aggressive. The alienation this evokes is not by chance. Cameron Jamie himself grew up in an American suburb dominated by mainstream culture and with both films he looks at the manipulated ‘ideal’ personifications of the American way and the apparently benign visual language. Taking part himself in long-johns with a naked protruding fake ass and a facial mask reminiscent of the masked chamber wrestling matches à la lucha libre that were popular in his surroundings, in The New Life Jamie fights with a Michael Jackson imitator, in reality possibly the saddest product of physical normalisation and adaptation to the ever dominant white norm in multicultural America. With the wrestling match presented here, Jamie provides a kind of inverted recursive effect of the imitation of an imitation of an imitation, as a result of which the attempt to look like others becomes synonymous with the loss of one’s own identity.