Baby, Baby, Baby: The Fetishisation of Justin Bieber

There's a term in film theory called scopophilia. In its most basic form scopophila refers to the pleasure of looking at naked bodies. In Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema, film theorist Laura Mulvey has appropriated the term to specifically encompass the notion of the male gaze. Essentially she suggests that in film, the camera has a particular gender (male) and that its role is to appease the spectator by filming the  female's body in such a way that it becomes a product of  sexual and fetishistic pleasure. Sadly, I think that in this period  Mulvey's theory needs to be reworked to accomodate a body that is not female, namely the body of Justin Bieber.

Much fuss has been made of how rubbish the Biebster's music is and how he represents little more than  a commercialized boy crush for (mostly) pre-teen girls. Yet few people stop to question how this image of Justin Bieber was conceived in the first place. The fact of the matter is that Mr Bieber exemplifies the concept of a fetish object. Though his music videos and concert tours are filmed in a way which makes them appear family-friendly, they're actually selling a kiddie brand of sex. The various close-ups of his face (particularly the hair and the eyes) in the various media we see him in seem innocent enough and, indeed, they are. Except for the fact that he is constantly lit and, by extension, performs in a way which sexualizes this innocence in  specific ways. Whenever we see Bieber he's either surrounded by soft lighting or strobe lights (or, in the case of his latest music video, both). That makes him forced to perform two types of "innocence". When he is softly lit, he is angelic and sensitive, the kind of boy every mother would want their pre-teen daughter to marry. When he is in strobe lights he remains angelic but also playful, maybe veering ever so slightly towards danger.

 These two "innocent" faces of Bieber are at constant odds with one another when he's on stage. It's kind of hard to be squeaky clean choir boy and a  flirty version of  'Dennis the Menace' at the same time. Yet as Bieber, his manager, his camera crew and his fans know, the only way for him to stay in the limelight is to play both roles. That way he becomes the fetish object of both the good Christian girl and the slightly more rebellious pre-teen girl, the kind who wants to accelerate her growth a little faster than it actually should. In his latest music video for Boyfriend we see exactly what an uneasy mix these two "innocent" identities create when they're forced to play together. We see particularly in this video how Bieber battles to be cutsey on the verge of sexy. Let's face it though, he really doesn't know what sexy is. Nor does he really know what cutsey is. He barely had time to learn what those things are while he was hanging out in the recording studio. All he knows is that there's a camera there and he's its object, a product of its gaze. Just like Mulvey's proverbial woman who plays the fetishized object on a film screen, Bieber is aware of only one thing: it's the camera's world. He just lives in it.

Source for Photo 1: http://www.people.com/people/justin_bieber/0,,,00.html

Source for Photo 2: http://www.ebreviews.com/your-justin-bieber-adventure-begins-here-2-1356.html