Frontline (TV Series)

The Merchants of Cool (2001)

Douglas Rushkoff: Self - Correspondent

Quotes 

• Correspondent : A lot of people seem to sense anger coming off juggalos, 'cause there's a lot of middle finger stuff... I mean, who's the middle finger to?

  Interviewed Juggalo#1 : The middle finger is to everybody who doesn't understand what we're doing. It's to the world.

  Interviewed Juggalo#2 : To the mainstream.

  Interviewed Juggalo#1 : People who don't understand, people like these people who drive by honking their horns, drive by laughing at us. We don't care. That's who the middle fingers and the "fuck yous" are for.

  Interviewed Juggalo#3 : Fuck, I mean, to hell with society, you know. I mean, we worry about society and what they think. They control what goes on in our bedroom, you know, what we dress like, what our hair color is. Why let it control it here? This is where we have fun.

• Himself - Correspondent : Jessica Biel's first big part was on a fledgling television network devoted to the teenager, the WB. She played a minister's daughter on the wholesome teen drama 7th Heaven. 7th Heaven was part of the WB's newly devised formula, radical by the standards of teen television: Keep it clean.

• Himself - Correspondent : By its third season, the WB made a course change. Their new trajectory: Dawson's Creek, a show about a group of sex-obsessed high school friends in an idyllic Cape Cod town. On Dawson's first episode, one of its lead characters, 14-year-old Pacey, begins a sexual affair with his teacher.

• Correspondent : [talking about the singer Britney Spears]  She hit the scene at 16 with "Baby, One More Time," as a naughty Catholic schoolgirl bursting out of her uniform. When it came time for a spread in Rolling Stone, the 17-year-old self-professed virgin Britney struck the classic nymphet pose. And at the Video Music Awards last year, when Britney finally and famously came out of her clothes, she wasn't just pleasing eager young boys, she was delivering a powerful missive to girls: Your body is your best asset. Flaunt your sexuality even if you don't understand it. And that's the message that matters most because Britney's most loyal fans are teenage girls.

• Correspondent : In bringing teen sexual content to what had always been network TV's 8:00 o'clock family hour, Dawson's Creek and the WB made the headlines. However reluctantly, they had raised the sexual stakes even further. What would teens come to expect from TV now? Who would top Dawson's? MTV, that's who, by launching a new nighttime soap unambiguously entitled Undressed. Dispensing with plot almost completely, its quick-cut, channel-surf-resistant vignettes draw their characters so thinly they nearly disappear.

• Himself - Correspondent : Having declared them worthy of a slot on TRL, MTV now also had a stake in making Limp Bizkit stars. The network put the band on their Spring Break special.

• Correspondent : And girls get dragged down there right along with boys. The media machine has spit out a second caricature. Perhaps we can call this stereotype "the midriff." The midriff is no more true to life than the mook. If he is arrested in adolescence, she is prematurely adult. If he doesn't care what people think of him, she is consumed by appearances. If his thing is crudeness, hers is sex. The midriff is really just a collection of the same old sexual cliches, but repackaged as a new kind of female empowerment. "I am midriff, hear me roar. I am a sexual object, but I'm proud of it."