Tortures for the Eyes

In his treatise, “On the Sublime,” Longinus rhetorically wonders how his predecessors might comment and respond to his writings were they to read them present day (132).

In the year 2010, I propose the same question to the philosopher himself: How would Longinus respond to the “art” that contemporary Americans consider a form of expression, and how would it have affected him? I will use the video text of Britney Spears’s four minute music video, “Give Me More” as an example of such art.



“Give Me More” is what Longinus calls “pseudo tragic” in his chapter on “Defects That Militate Against Sublimity” (116). The viewer is thrown into a sublime of a dimmed bar/ dance club with flashing lights and attractive people provoking “wonder” and awe (114). The next location depicted takes place in a similarly darkened atmosphere with only the singer in view. Spears observantly sings, “Feels like no one else in the room.” Spears, wearing a top hat, a leather vest, leather underwear and fishnet stockings, walks in circles around a metal pole singing, “Gimme more Gimme more/ Gimme Gimme more.” After a minute and forty-five seconds passes, her wish is granted and the attractive people from the bar scene join her to dance alongside the pole.

It is at approximately two minutes of repetition that it is safe to call Spears the “frivolous fellow” that blows “on tiny little pipes without control of breath” (116). Spears holds onto the pole and walks around it, but does not have control over her environment and does not imitate properly or use the pole for what it was intended for: dancing.

Spears slanders the sublime through “tawdriness,” or through behaving “of the nature of cheap finery; showy or gaudy without real value” (116). Spears lacks grandeur and falsely glamorizes her body, song and video to enhance the emotional response of viewers.

It is worthy to note that Spears’s dancing scenes are filmed mostly from her chest up. This contrasts her earlier music videos that not only expose her entire torso, but have four minutes of actual synchronized dancing. For example, Spears’s debut music video, “Hit Me Baby One More Time” includes varieties of movements. “Give Me More” is the first music video released after the birth of her first son. Perhaps we can contribute the changes in her videos to age and experience, paralleling Longinus’s comparison of Homer’s the Iliad and the Odyssey: “writing the Iliad in the prime of his life, he made the whole body of the work dramatic and vivid, whereas the greater part of the Odyssey is narrative, as is characteristic of old age” (125). Though the size of her clothing stayed the same, the sense of age and experience dominated her latter video.

It is safe to say that Longinus would classify this particular piece of “art” as an attempt at persuasion and therefore not a true form of sublime. According to Longinus, “For the effect of elevated language is not to persuade the hearers, but to amaze them; and at all times, and in every way, what transports us with wonder is more telling than what merely persuades or gratifies us” (114).

Works Cited

Longinus. "On the Sublime." Classical Literary Criticsm. The Penguin Group: London 2000.