What we see is what we don’t get

Reflections on Funny Harm, by Dr. Marc Newman

“Scooby Dooby Doo, here are you
You're ready and you're willing
If we can count on you, Scooby Doo
I know we'll catch that villain.”

Funny Harm is one interpretation of a disjointed and incomplete archive. It is based on fragments, and has been cataloged into what resembles a story, only in that it has the signifiers and the constructs of a cultural artifact — it is a book with chapters etc., yet its narrative is only coherent when read with rhizomic reason, and a disjointed disconnected reading. Funny Harm’s assemblage of textural and visual confetti leads to a dead-end. It forms an ouroboros of negation that doubles into itself as a collapsing blackhole of contrasted blackness. You pull from the margins of the work, the hidden aspects, which leaves a void within the book itself. You are left starting at a blank page. A reader attempts to conduct a hermetic sealing of the text’s quantitative reiteration and qualitative suspense (by framing the interpersonal dynamics and performative aspects); however, in doing so, you become a participant, and the question is not ‘what the book means?’, but ‘what do I mean?’. While Funny Harm presents and represents oneself as a quantum event scattered across fragmentary messages and semiology (in that it is an ontology of the camp’s language, methods etc.), it is best experienced as a choose your own adventure. With that framing in mind, my preface is a reflection on a reading rather than a cultural interpretation; a casual comment rather than a critical commentary.

It is in a notebook entry excluded from the book (yet again, grasping meaning from the margins), that the reader can begin to define some aspects of the camp’s mission. This artifact is “Ripping the Face”, which is constructed within an alternative “Scooby Doo, Where are you” universe. It illustrates a disrobing of the fake order, revealing a shadowy operation beneath a villainy facade, a mask-behind-a-mask, yet one that is more authentic than the ‘false face’ that is presented to the world and its world order. This is an ongoing—but unsaid—theme, in the notebook entries, change is necessary and urgent, but it is only from within that order can be reconstructed.

In the cartoon universe that, “Scooby Doo, Where are you?” presents, a roaming band of young adults attempt to solve mysteries. Each of the gang possess different traits and personalities, covering a spectrum of rational and irrational dimensions. Each one anchored in a different element of the father, mother, and child triad, conjoined to The Law, and The Real. A truth (the mystery) is buried, and an arcing repetitive narrative of discovery and truth-seeking plays out over many episodes, each leading to an ‘unmasking’.

What is being unmasked and what is the revealed truth?

In the series it is villains. Yet this Funny Harm illustration suggests a different purpose: unmasking is a ritual attempting to connect us to a societal order that transcends capital. The mission of the mystery gang, as interpreted in “Ripping the Face”, is that “Scooby Doo, Where are You?” is radical revolution.

It portrays not individual bad actors, but the villains who are responsible for the hegemonic continuity of the Ideological State Apparatus. Yet while the Mystery Gang attempts an overthrowing of the established order it fails again-and-again in its mission. This is deliberate. Repetition is required as Capital and the masking of The Real is a dogma that is dug in and deep. It’s a dogma that can only be destroyed by a determined destruction of an elevated and conscious act that rises above the symbolic (it is noteworthy that there is always a police or detective figure present at unmasking as they represent the symbolic law, but not The Law, which is the collective identity of the Mystery Gang, and their the ego-into-forming-superego, and Id, Scooby — the psychodynamic process required to bring down the order — the work can only be done by a whole, fully integrated self. However, the greatest irony is that even within this integrated whole, the revolution required to reform the societal order to reconstruct it into a fairer and just mode of being, is only possible by the patriarchy as villainy is often revealed by a white supremacist, everyman figure, of Fred Jones who delivers a final blow to the corrupt established order by holding up the truth, and by extension The Real, for the viewer ((the consumer in the desire machine)) to bear witness, like a slain head in the works of Caravaggio, it asks a question beyond the frame.)

This rendering within “Ripping the Face” is drawn with deliberate irony. It is a perversion of the simple premise within the ideological pedagogy of “Scooby Doo, Where are You? – the edict for children not to trust strangers, even to distrust those closest and seemingly trustworthy. While this a missive on the individual, it is the collective that should not be trusted, and children should not trust the societal order.

What “Ripping the Face” suggests is that villainy is permanent, and the masking in “Scooby Doo, Where are You?” is not of a villain, it is that the villain’s mask is a mask that masks villainy. It is not a villain that need unmasking, but villainy. It’s not just masks, all the way down, but villainy, all the way down.