In Raygun’s story, we see entitlement, academia’s blindness, or an utter lack of skill. But watching her documentary shows how the filmmaker offers a powerful tool for understanding art appreciation. This essay is a crash course in art appreciation because all of you can be superior to Raygun within the time it takes to finish reading this.
Rachael Gunn earned a PhD in cultural studies but failed every test of self-understanding. While I want to use her as a tool for your learning, I need to describe how she and her husband behaved. I’ll be brief, because her story is not one for the record, I assure you. The documentary, “Untold: Raygun: Breaking Badly”, feels like a spoof of an honest documentary. Viewers are left wondering whether the documentary was meant to showcase or deride Gunn's work. I'll summarize the film, with necessary editorial improvements, so you can use your extra hour for literally anything; watching grass grow would be more productive. In it, her husband is a terrible breakdancer, b-boy as it were, and she is a kid who loves to dance. The two crazy kids find each other and bond over a mutual inability to see the world clearly. When he realizes she'll go farther in the field because there are fewer female breakers (not because he's had any revelation about his own dancing), they both happily live in delusions of grandeur. In one telling moment, husband and wife celebrate their brilliance at choosing her b-girl name (Raygun being a surprising leap from Rachael Gunn, apparently). They take the Australian breaking scene by — what's the opposite of storm? Stillness, perhaps. But the field is fairly empty, according to the documentary. (The internet implies there were plenty better.) Then the fateful day of the Australian qualifiers comes, and she outperforms everyone. The movie underlines this point: she won on the day that mattered, and so she ended up at the Olympics. The head coach claims to have barely seen her. Raygun competes. It's embarrassing (something anyone who'd seen her work before could have guessed). She returns home to jeers and finds in herself more self-delusional strength. She becomes a public speaker, basically falling upward. The arc is that self-deluded white women make it in a world that is framed for them.
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From the film’s folly, we see the first step in art’s appreciation. The first step is comparison. The film needed a hero, so it built one from a subpar dancer who underperformed spectacularly. But their omission of better dancers, even those who were used as counterpoints, is glaring. People make meaning through comparison. When you ask if my hair looks good today, you’re asking in comparison to other days. If he’s cute, it’s in comparison to other guys.
