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Guess who it is! Hint: check the title. That's right, it's everyone's favorite teen-angst-er, Holden Caulfield! I originally intended to make a video of someone dressed up as Holden in front of the museum of natural history singing this song (actually, I've been intending to make that video for a while), but I didn't have time.
What I wanted to address in this piece was our cool unit's interest in being "real". In Catcher in the Rye Holden is partially so depressed because of his failure to find anyone "real", and we discussed in our cool unit how in fact being 'real' doesn't seem to be possible. Holden supposedly gave a personality to the flavorless, phony generation from whence he came, so he seemed like an important figure in the history of "cool". In the video I also wanted to draw attention to the complete conflict of taste communities-- as seeing a white literary character preforming this would be ridiculous.
There wasn't much of a process to making this, other than looking up different interpretations of what Holden looked like and trying to put them together. I went to a lot of effort to make him seem tired and grimey, because that was the vibe that I got from him reading the book, but I still wanted him to look young, because him being a teenager is the only thing that made his angst cool.
Making art seems to be cool in society right now, but I think it really depends. I'm all for expression and art as a vector for that, but to me personally it doesn't matter unless you have something worthwhile to say. screaming is still screaming no matter the finesse, it's saying something important that makes it worth the noise.
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