Rakers: Mediated, Youth Gladiators on Skateboards at the End of the World
As a glitchy prognosticator of the future, the artificial intelligence personality Max Headroom embodies this arriving-present, appearing anywhere a screen wired into the vast digital computer network can be accessed by Headroom’s infinite capacity to travel global circuits, bringing the information of elsewhere to his fleshy comrades on the other side of the screen. A gimmicky creation that debuted on a Channel 4 show in the UK in 1985, Max Headroom featured in an eponymous series in the U.S. from 1987 to 1989. Headroom was a snarky ghost in the machine—a glib digital bon vivant with a chronic electronic stutter that vocalized the staccato emergence of computer technologies across the everyday of the late 80s in the industrialized landscape. The show placed Headroom and his human counterparts, a team of TV journalists, in a dystopic cyber-punk cityscape, combining equal parts Mad Max apocalypse with Blade Runner corporate control. Max Headroom, with his digital capacity to move instantly anywhere within the ubiquitous network, constitutes a cyborg partnership with his primary colleague, the journalist Edison Carter who is perpetually wired in with a camera unit so that he can be “live” instantly and everywhere his own news “network” is broadcast (or streamed, though the verb didn’t yet exist). This collaboration and inter-corporeality between the virtual and the real, the immaterial persona and biological person, curiously finds its mutual attentions drawn to both Japan and skateboarding in an episode about the bloody underground youth cult of “raking”—a practice waiting to be codified and marketed by a cabal of scheming promoters, politicians, CEOs, and network execs.
In a long, dramatically lit boardroom, white Network 23 executives sit discussing the potential for this latest discovery. The chairman engages some buttons before him and a large screen opposite him comes alive with what we are told is bootlegged video circulating through the city of young men on motorized skateboards carving and slashing over the smooth curved surfaces of an old pool, spinning endless 360s, and colliding into one another, their bodies flung against the hard surfaces. Another executive continues explaining to her colleagues: "Seems that we have a new and exciting... race game, called...raking…The figures are astounding, if they are to be believed. It’s becoming a big money sport…The origin of the game came from the kids crudely motorizing their skateboards." The camera pulls back to take in the suited men and women watching the video as three skaters cross and weave until two smash into one another. Miss Formby continues, “Accidents and collisions became part of the macho style…” She chuckles, turning to the chairman and in a light-hearted tone adds, “Youthful pugnacity...” her voice turns serious as the camera cuts to her in close-up, then the chairman, and finally a third executive who looks knowingly at the chairman “…has now been refined, as aggression.”
The intercom announces a video link with the head of sports and Ped Xing, CEO of Zik-Zak, the financing corporation. After an introduction from the sports division chief, Xing, appearing in the split-screen image next to the chief with the text “New Tokyo, Sat Link 87” appearing below him, announces grandly, “We, all of us, are on the verge of a brand-new era in sports—raking! Raking!” The room, empty except for the small meeting of these powerful people, echoes with their applause as the scene ends.
In the episode’s denouement, a raking demo is held for the benefit of a corrupt politician who is expected to legalize the new “sport” and pave the way for raking tracks with betting concessions to be opened everywhere. As befitting raking’s gritty, “authentic” origins among the kids, the demo takes place in a massive abandoned building with its center hollowed out allowing the spectators to stand on the upper floors gazing down into the huge swimming pool that stretches across the building’s floor. Two skaters race into the pool from adjacent corners, flying past one another, then banking high in the pool’s corners to gain speed. They pursue and engage. Their gripped fists encased in studded gloves with three long razors, like talons, protruding from the tops of their fists. One slashes at the other as they pass and in the grainy, dim murk of the industrial building, he falls, clutching his stomach. Crawling to his skateboard, he rights it and struggles to balance before riding forward, accumulating harrowing speed around the curved sides of the pool. The battle continues amid a frenzy of excitement among the spectators. The wounded skater is barely surviving and then the coup de grace is delivered and he goes down. The politician is enraged by the sheer violence of what he is witnessing. Edison Carter, secretly filming from the pool’s edge, leaps into the pool, filming the wounded skater, proclaiming, “I’m going live, it’s our only chance.” The raker team manager, a massive, mustachioed man in shades, attacks Carter. He delivers a punishing blow, knocking Carter’s camera away. Unable to transmit, his own mediation of the scene crippled, Carter yells for an accompanying friend to seize the nearest television set which Max has commandeered internally and the station crew has switched over to “two-way,” allowing the monitor to actually, well, monitor. No longer just a passive viewing surface but an active “eye”, the screen is held precariously on a floor high above the pool, gazing down at Carter and the riotous scene. From this vantage, Max takes over as the voice “coming to you live and direct” and begins to narrate the revealed horror: of raking, “a sport which maliciously exploits young kids…”
As each is able, Carter and Max Headroom leap to break the story of kids’ bones being broken in service of capitalist spectacle. It is a familiar intervention of investigative reportage in a crisis of human rights: kids are being exploited! Creepy men are profiting! The State colludes but under the shaming eye of the media, recants!
But the episode also becomes a narrative of Japanophobia: the agents and promoters offer their underground prize as an exclusive commodity to the executives of Zik-Zak, the omnipresent but shadowy Japanese corporation that holds commercial sway in Headroom’s dystopic universe. The urgent news story on blood sport featuring drug-addicted boys battling on skateboards subtly transforms into an overt critique of corporate need for spectacle-as-content with the darker subtext that it is Japanese corporations that are willing to put yen on the table to commodify the suffering of young white boys while appropriating their “authentic practices” for mass-market product.
Ironically, the show was commodifying skateboarding as a trendy form of pre-apocalypse sport that seemed poised to fit perfectly into the mise-en-scène of a failed future, if not entirely cause the collapse of society in the first place. In 1987 global skateboarding had no official arenas, no universal regulations, it could literally be done almost anywhere and yet maintained an aura of underground cool when the episode was aired. Skateboarding was a perfect foil to the techno-geek-crusader of Max Headroom. In this imaginary, skateboards are equipped with small motors and with the extra speed, punk riders in mohawks, ripped jeans, spikes and leather, skate furiously inside an empty pool, attacking each other in a doomsday version of jousting. What began on the streets as a youth practice has caught the attention of hype-men and greedy promoters eager to find a new marketable event to pitch into the insatiable maw of global sensationalist programming of big-time TV networks. But this sensationalism is exactly what the show at the structural level depends on and so leaves us asking, “Who is actually raking it in?” and “Who is raked across the coals of white-hot desire for young bodies in pain?”
With its bodies engaged in risky action, skateboarding animated a show about a journalist always half-hidden behind a monstrous camera-appendage and his virtual sidekick confined to jerky appearances on monitors and screens. Japanese corporations are made to represent an omnipresent agency of both venture capital and vague distant markets, both of which are disembodied and function as the mirror to Max Headroom’s own disembodied, uncanny presence. Of course, it is particularly the Japanese entrepreneurs who should be so sensitive to the potential of new audio/visual content. It is precisely this vision of Japan that continues to organize so much research on Japan, a Japan that produces the technology of the future and increasingly generates the mobile content for future technologies in the form of anime and video games, or invents new modes for using the technology which portends new content forms.
With Japan Inc. of the 1980s being viewed as a primary producer of consumer technology and a significant and unexpected commercial and cultural threat, the inclusion of Zik-Zak as the predatory financing corporation is unsurprising. While hardly the explicit focus of the episode, it is Zik-Zak’s interest in licensing and developing this “gory sport” for mass export that exposes themes central to our discussion. From turning our attention to this unusual conjunction of Japanese corporate investment and skateboarding, we unfold an uncanny site of youthful play commodified based on its “authenticity” and potential for sensational, spectator-pleasing violence. This play is dangerously absurd until violently made coherent once organized and legalized. The play-practice of skateboarding is then placed in a tight relationship with spectators and an intended media machine, a plan interrupted by Carter/Headroom’s own humanist media machine. It is not simply the easy commodification of youth practices that I want to draw attention to, but the role of the media and spectacular image making in its production as a product in the global imaginary. It is this immediate materiality of skateboarders and the digital virtuality of transglobal visual media and markets that I want to emphasize as we retreat forward into the present of Tokyo with an eye on the emptiness of architecture and lost futures.
In a long, dramatically lit boardroom, white Network 23 executives sit discussing the potential for this latest discovery. The chairman engages some buttons before him and a large screen opposite him comes alive with what we are told is bootlegged video circulating through the city of young men on motorized skateboards carving and slashing over the smooth curved surfaces of an old pool, spinning endless 360s, and colliding into one another, their bodies flung against the hard surfaces. Another executive continues explaining to her colleagues: "Seems that we have a new and exciting... race game, called...raking…The figures are astounding, if they are to be believed. It’s becoming a big money sport…The origin of the game came from the kids crudely motorizing their skateboards." The camera pulls back to take in the suited men and women watching the video as three skaters cross and weave until two smash into one another. Miss Formby continues, “Accidents and collisions became part of the macho style…” She chuckles, turning to the chairman and in a light-hearted tone adds, “Youthful pugnacity...” her voice turns serious as the camera cuts to her in close-up, then the chairman, and finally a third executive who looks knowingly at the chairman “…has now been refined, as aggression.”
The intercom announces a video link with the head of sports and Ped Xing, CEO of Zik-Zak, the financing corporation. After an introduction from the sports division chief, Xing, appearing in the split-screen image next to the chief with the text “New Tokyo, Sat Link 87” appearing below him, announces grandly, “We, all of us, are on the verge of a brand-new era in sports—raking! Raking!” The room, empty except for the small meeting of these powerful people, echoes with their applause as the scene ends.
In the episode’s denouement, a raking demo is held for the benefit of a corrupt politician who is expected to legalize the new “sport” and pave the way for raking tracks with betting concessions to be opened everywhere. As befitting raking’s gritty, “authentic” origins among the kids, the demo takes place in a massive abandoned building with its center hollowed out allowing the spectators to stand on the upper floors gazing down into the huge swimming pool that stretches across the building’s floor. Two skaters race into the pool from adjacent corners, flying past one another, then banking high in the pool’s corners to gain speed. They pursue and engage. Their gripped fists encased in studded gloves with three long razors, like talons, protruding from the tops of their fists. One slashes at the other as they pass and in the grainy, dim murk of the industrial building, he falls, clutching his stomach. Crawling to his skateboard, he rights it and struggles to balance before riding forward, accumulating harrowing speed around the curved sides of the pool. The battle continues amid a frenzy of excitement among the spectators. The wounded skater is barely surviving and then the coup de grace is delivered and he goes down. The politician is enraged by the sheer violence of what he is witnessing. Edison Carter, secretly filming from the pool’s edge, leaps into the pool, filming the wounded skater, proclaiming, “I’m going live, it’s our only chance.” The raker team manager, a massive, mustachioed man in shades, attacks Carter. He delivers a punishing blow, knocking Carter’s camera away. Unable to transmit, his own mediation of the scene crippled, Carter yells for an accompanying friend to seize the nearest television set which Max has commandeered internally and the station crew has switched over to “two-way,” allowing the monitor to actually, well, monitor. No longer just a passive viewing surface but an active “eye”, the screen is held precariously on a floor high above the pool, gazing down at Carter and the riotous scene. From this vantage, Max takes over as the voice “coming to you live and direct” and begins to narrate the revealed horror: of raking, “a sport which maliciously exploits young kids…”
As each is able, Carter and Max Headroom leap to break the story of kids’ bones being broken in service of capitalist spectacle. It is a familiar intervention of investigative reportage in a crisis of human rights: kids are being exploited! Creepy men are profiting! The State colludes but under the shaming eye of the media, recants!
But the episode also becomes a narrative of Japanophobia: the agents and promoters offer their underground prize as an exclusive commodity to the executives of Zik-Zak, the omnipresent but shadowy Japanese corporation that holds commercial sway in Headroom’s dystopic universe. The urgent news story on blood sport featuring drug-addicted boys battling on skateboards subtly transforms into an overt critique of corporate need for spectacle-as-content with the darker subtext that it is Japanese corporations that are willing to put yen on the table to commodify the suffering of young white boys while appropriating their “authentic practices” for mass-market product.
Ironically, the show was commodifying skateboarding as a trendy form of pre-apocalypse sport that seemed poised to fit perfectly into the mise-en-scène of a failed future, if not entirely cause the collapse of society in the first place. In 1987 global skateboarding had no official arenas, no universal regulations, it could literally be done almost anywhere and yet maintained an aura of underground cool when the episode was aired. Skateboarding was a perfect foil to the techno-geek-crusader of Max Headroom. In this imaginary, skateboards are equipped with small motors and with the extra speed, punk riders in mohawks, ripped jeans, spikes and leather, skate furiously inside an empty pool, attacking each other in a doomsday version of jousting. What began on the streets as a youth practice has caught the attention of hype-men and greedy promoters eager to find a new marketable event to pitch into the insatiable maw of global sensationalist programming of big-time TV networks. But this sensationalism is exactly what the show at the structural level depends on and so leaves us asking, “Who is actually raking it in?” and “Who is raked across the coals of white-hot desire for young bodies in pain?”
With its bodies engaged in risky action, skateboarding animated a show about a journalist always half-hidden behind a monstrous camera-appendage and his virtual sidekick confined to jerky appearances on monitors and screens. Japanese corporations are made to represent an omnipresent agency of both venture capital and vague distant markets, both of which are disembodied and function as the mirror to Max Headroom’s own disembodied, uncanny presence. Of course, it is particularly the Japanese entrepreneurs who should be so sensitive to the potential of new audio/visual content. It is precisely this vision of Japan that continues to organize so much research on Japan, a Japan that produces the technology of the future and increasingly generates the mobile content for future technologies in the form of anime and video games, or invents new modes for using the technology which portends new content forms.
With Japan Inc. of the 1980s being viewed as a primary producer of consumer technology and a significant and unexpected commercial and cultural threat, the inclusion of Zik-Zak as the predatory financing corporation is unsurprising. While hardly the explicit focus of the episode, it is Zik-Zak’s interest in licensing and developing this “gory sport” for mass export that exposes themes central to our discussion. From turning our attention to this unusual conjunction of Japanese corporate investment and skateboarding, we unfold an uncanny site of youthful play commodified based on its “authenticity” and potential for sensational, spectator-pleasing violence. This play is dangerously absurd until violently made coherent once organized and legalized. The play-practice of skateboarding is then placed in a tight relationship with spectators and an intended media machine, a plan interrupted by Carter/Headroom’s own humanist media machine. It is not simply the easy commodification of youth practices that I want to draw attention to, but the role of the media and spectacular image making in its production as a product in the global imaginary. It is this immediate materiality of skateboarders and the digital virtuality of transglobal visual media and markets that I want to emphasize as we retreat forward into the present of Tokyo with an eye on the emptiness of architecture and lost futures.
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