Frequent collaborators Spike Jonze and Kanye West released a new short film today entitled We Were Once a Fairytale, and it’s easily their most accomplished work together to date.  While the film is far from apologetic, it nevertheless finds Kanye taking on his recent public image to the point of brutal self-satire.  Culling from references as incongruent as Ridley Scott, Beethoven, and Bret Easton Ellis, Jonze and West have somehow constructed a film that is, at once, typical Kanye West fodder (there is no doubt his fans will be pleased) and yet at the same time an inspired black comedy: that is, it’s a sort of disorientating and oddly mesmerizing perversion of the latter’s public image, painting him as a superficial, rich, uninspired, socially incompetent dilettante who has gone so far ‘off,’ for so long, so as to have lost all sense of self (that BEE reference make sense yet?).

Personally, I love this idea – to build a character not on the foundations of Mr. West himself, but rather on those very traits used so recently to describe him in the mass media – not only because it affords the opportunity for self-mockery, but also, and more importantly, because it makes for a far more interesting character (one that would not be out of place in one of Jonze’s films).  And I think this is precisely what has made Kanye West such an interesting contemporary public figure: in an era where even the most hardcore of punks thank you ‘kindly’ for attending their shows (and the most hardcore of rappers hang out with Bette Midler) it’s oddly reassuring to see someone publicly refuse to accede to a system where the artist is delimited to the realm of the everyday consumer. Kanye is shamelessly self-indulgent and self-aggrandizing, as real a ‘Rock Star’ as one can be in a time when even Paul McCartney plays ‘Rock Band’; a time that has forgotten the allure of the immortal, lofty musician (better yet: the allure of affectation); a time where the only thing we believe to be the ‘real deal’ is when some dude dies of a heroin overdose.  That is, Kanye himself, much like his caricature in Jonze’s film, is a true character in the most literary (or is it cinematic?) sense of the word: a fabrication that allows us to become willingly subjugated for, at the least, some sort of decent entertainment.

This is precisely why, regardless of the parodying, and even if one were to call Jonze’s film somewhat self-loathing, Kanye remains dressed at his self-same sharpest (that knife does little to damper his look).  Apparently self-satire can still be framed to make oneself look eminently ‘cool’…