B is for Bootleg: "SpongeBob in Tehran" and Shanzhai in New York
B is for Bootleg: "SpongeBob in Tehran" and Shanzhai in New York
Counterfeit media can be comically uncanny, but as a Twitter post and an ongoing art collective demonstrate, bootlegs are also political works which shed light upon unmarked aspects of their originals
SpongeBob Squarepants is about nuclear warfare.
Didn't see it coming? You're not alone — until this week, I thought SpongeBob was just an entertaining cartoon about an enterprising fry cook, a mewling pet snail, and a dumb pink starfish who lives under a rock. Perhaps, however, you did have some inkling that the fifth longest running American animated television series has a connection to Cold War arms races. In that case, apologies for framing my epiphany as something new — I’m late to the game on the open secret.
SpongeBob Squarepants has been broadcast in 25 languages and 170 countries, but if you haven't watched the show (maybe you're older, never had cable, had helicopter parents who fed you a strict diet of PBS kids), all you really need to know is that SpongeBob follows a gaggle of anthropomorphized marine creatures who live in an underwater city called "Bikini Bottom." Bikini Bottom is fictional (obviously), but Nickelodeon has confirmed that the city's name references Bikini Atoll, the coral reef in the Marshall Islands where the United States conducted catastrophic nuclear tests between 1946 and 1948. For at least 10 years, fans have advanced a theory that the residents of Bikini Bottom are radioactive mutants, a theory that writers and actors on the show have frequently debunked. The connection between Bikini Bottom and its namesake island chain — whose residents were forced to relocate after radiation contaminated their waters and rendered their land uninhabitable — is nonetheless sporadically visible onscreen; when the Marshall Islands nominated Bikini Atoll for inscription on the 2010 World Heritage List, their nomination referenced the fact that SpongeBob "episodes contain occasional references to the actual testing with footage of the bombs." In an article titled "Unsettling SpongeBob and the Legacies of Violence on Bikini Bottom," professor Holly M. Barker even argues that SpongeBob’s cheery existence in Bikini Bottom "continues the violent and racist expulsion of Indigenous peoples from their lands (and in this case their cosmos) that enables US hegemonic powers to extend their military and colonial interests in the postwar era."
I didn't pick up on any of this when I first watched SpongeBob — partly because I was seven, and partly because besides the aforementioned "explosion footage," the original series maintains Bikini Bottom as a strict fiction. Though the show sometimes depicts its characters above the water's surface as a punchline, SpongeBob doesn't situate Bikini Bottom in earthly geography, or geopolitics. But there's a version of SpongeBob you may not know about that does place the characters in a real world context, one that kickstarted the thinking behind the essay you're reading now: the unsettling, semi-viral bootleg film "Spongebob in Tehran."
A few weeks ago, Twitter user Séamus Malekafzali tweeted several stills from a 2017 Iranian bootleg SpongeBob film called "SpongeBob in Tehran." "A lack of US-Iran copyright agreements allow Iranian filmmakers to fully animate a film where Spongebob, Patrick, and Squidward visit an underwater Tehran, complete with Azadi Tower made out of shells," Malekafzali wrote. Malekafzali's post enjoyed moderate virality, and showed up frequently enough on my timeline that I eventually caved and watched the whole movie (though I haven't checked out the sequel just yet).
The basic plot of "SpongeBob in Tehran," as far as I can tell after one wild watch-through, is that SpongeBob and his friends must travel to Iran in search of condiment ingredients after SpongeBob's place of employment, the Krusty Krab burger joint, runs dry on its signature secret sauce. Watching "SpongeBob in Tehran" for its plot will disappoint you —it's the visuals that make the film interesting. Many of the backdrops seem to be lifted directly from the original animation, and the film's culturally specific elements — including the Persian food Patrick and SpongeBob drool over and the signage they read— are superimposed on top, sketched in careful, seamless mimicry of the original cartoon's art. The effect of combining generically familiar SpongeBob animation with distinctly Iranian imagery feels uncanny — but uncanny to whom?
"SpongeBob in Tehran" is hardly the sole example of a Western cultural phenomenon remixed by non-Western media producers; Harry Potter, for example, has received comparable culturally specific adaptations. In addition to the seven Harry Potter novels J.K. Rowling published, unauthorized Chinese authors capitalizing on Pottermania published titles such as Harry Potter and the Porcelain Doll, Harry Potter and Leopard Walk Up to Dragon, Harry Potter and the Golden Turtle, and Harry Potter and the Crystal Vase in the early 2000s. In these books, Harry uses chopsticks, speaks Chinese, and travels to the sacred Mount Tai, among other activities.
In an essay published for The Believer, philosopher Byung-Chul Han offers Harry Potter and the Porcelain Doll as an example of shanzhai (山寨), a Chinese term for "fake" which applies to unsanctioned cultural products and physical goods. Han explains that shanzhai literally translates as “mountain stronghold,” a reference to its original meaning as a term for mountain fortresses operating on the outskirts of imperial government control. Shanzhai in the contemporary era refers to goods and cultural artifacts that mimic ones produced by larger corporations or cultural figures — in short, "knockoffs," "bootlegs," or "cheap imitations." However, terms like "bootleg'' promote a moral and legal agenda that unfairly accuses shanzhai goods of existing in bad (or unlawful) faith. As William Hennessy explains in "Deconstructing Shanzhai," "shanzhai behavior is not necessarily against the law; it is just outside of the government’s control." And as Han takes care to explain, shanzhai goods are not necessarily worse than their originals, but often improve upon existing products in creative or cost-effective ways. Han argues that Shanzhai goods thus honor the original meaning of the term by resisting authority and monopoly, even if Western attitudes towards intellectual property have created an impression of shanzhai in the West as deceptive, fraudulent or crude.
"SpongeBob in Tehran" has been a punching bag for those suspicious of shanzhai — on YouTube, the actual film has about 21,000 views, but a video where a bunch of American dudes guffaw at the film's animation has been seen by upwards of a million. The success of YouTube videos that poke fun at bootlegs and the popularity of Instagram accounts like @bootlegworld demonstrate an ongoing Western fascination with the fact that the words, images and brands of dominant culture are not necessarily static or untouchable. Encountering a knockoff is like facing a double, and the constant impulse to satirize bootlegs may be born from a twisted exoticism which fetishizes words and images "lost in translation" while simultaneously condemning them.
The fashion archive and poetry collective Shanzhai Lyric, whose work is on view in MoMA PS 1's Greater New York survey through April 18, seeks to alter this dynamic by presenting shanzhai clothing as experimental poetry rather than fodder for ridicule. Shanzhai Lyric's Instagram presents garments covered in similar nonsensical language as @bootlegworld, but the collective asks why the Western gaze must find these mistranslations "hilarious" rather than poetic — "Shanzhai Lyric," declares their website, "explores the potential of mis-translation and nonsense as utopian world-making (breaking)."
What does world (breaking) mean? Perhaps it means the destabilization of accepted cultural realities to make way for new modes of thinking — a process literalized by Yoko Inoue's 2006 performance piece Transmigration of the Sold, which Shanzhai Lyric screened as part of an exhibition in 2020. Inspired by the post 9/11 "market mutation of cultural ideology and defensive patriotism" which spawned a boom of American flag merchandise on New York's Canal Street, Inoue presented a piece in which she unraveled flag-printed sweaters and rewound the yarn into balls of wool to be used for new purposes, all while tourists meandered by. "The shanzhai movement," writes Han, "might deconstruct the power of state authority at the political level and release democratic energies." Outside of China, the release of shanzhai's utopian potential may rely on translators like Shanzhai Lyric, who encourage us to regard mistranslations with openness rather than mockery, and Inoue, whose performance as a reverse Betsy Ross literally deconstructs American identity.
"SpongeBob in Tehran" is neither a groundbreaking work of art nor an explicitly political film, but the film opened up an uncanny valley that destabilized my understanding of the cartoon and forced me to think about what the original SpongeBob lacks. Unlike in SpongeBob Squarepants, weaponry is prevalent in "SpongeBob in Tehran" — over the course of the episode, SpongeBob faces a squad of guns, retreats to a bunker, and witnesses the use of RPG launchers, a type of projectile used during the Iran-Iraq war. To see explicit military weaponry present in SpongeBob was unsettling — more unsettling still, however, was the ensuing realization that the SpongeBob sanctioned by Nickelodeon used footage from an event of extreme U.S. military backed violence in a children's television show. And that's the power of the bootleg — by forcing us to confront something uncanny or abnormal, bootlegs might make us think twice about what we've already normalized, perhaps even unawares.
