Of Mice and Men

For the Mickey Mouse-headed men, there is no distinction between the individual - defined by desire - and the collectivity - defined by social desire. The Mickey Mouse-head characters are nomadic subjects. The global currency of the Disney brand is suggested by the video’s location at the edge of a vast ocean. The Mickey Mouse characters could appear on any shore. The open ocean backdrop suggests an expansive space – the borderless realm of global capital, and by default, the Walt Disney Company.

Mickey Mouse is the icon for a corporate media empire (a body without organs, as described by Deleuze), while doubling as a symbol of Walt’s eternal child. This dichotomy is manifest in The Match’s fragmented subjects; part man and part mouse.

The boxing match is a disjointed theater that plays with notions of difference and repetition. The jabbing is monotonous, yet inconsistent. The looped punching pattern is subtly different from exchange to exchange. The fighting structure is echoed in the music.  Each measure of music is arranged in a serial format, but each measure has tonal shifts and varied notes. The soundtrack is a dreamy loop sampled from the electronic musician Aphex Twin. Aphex Twin’s structural approach to music can be analogized to Warhol’s photo silk-screen series paintings - a serial process complicated by slight variations from canvas to canvas (in painting) or measure to measure (in musical composition).

The Mickey Mouse sparring is machine-like, but the exchanges do not repeat as loops. A perfect looping structure is only possible through a mechanical sampling process. The punching is varied. The video highlights the fragility and awkwardness of hand combat when subjected to the rules of simple machines: a single pivot step, straight jab, and a block. The drama of boxing is absent in The Match’s Mickey Mouse game.