On Lemonade by M.J. Brotherton
originally published in Video Video Zine, April 2016
Our bodies, they tell me, are mostly fluid. Our lives, I assume from experience, are mostly the making of lemonade out of lemons. And I know that each thing that I could drink, or eat, or somehow put in or on myself, is sold to me through the use of a body, encased in pink plastic with a slick sheen and a pumping soundtrack.
M.J. Brotherton's Lemonade is like watching seven televisions at once, each gushing something bright into your eyes: music videos, commercials, pornos, rom-coms, true-life crime dramas with their victims' doll-like faces. I am buying the product, because I want to somehow be in all these flashing frames at once, stimulated by all this separate simultaneous action. I want to be the baby doll that cries real tears that taste like lemonade, and wear the pink heels that break my feet and smell like piss and sugar and lead paint.
To be alive is to constantly adjust levels of various liquids, to maintain their temperatures and volumes, to engage with the right drips in the right places, to carry your water in the appropriate ways. This video is full of ambiguous, inappropriate dripping. Everything is wet, everything is leaking out. The frame is a diaper and it has failed us, and so time and space briefly collapse, allowing so much to occur all at once. In the relative stillness after so much lush and rapid-fire movement, you can see the blood pumping in a heeled foot, a vein straining in the held pose. There is always more wetness that just won't stay still.