My Italian friends asked me if I wanted to to do something special for 9/11. I was ashamed to say that the memory conjured something that I didn’t want to re-experience: bloodlust, revenge and war. All I can remember is how the moment of compassion and empathy that the incident called for eroded as fast as war plans were drawn-up to invade Afghanistan. Ten years ago all I could think about was the impending world war that would be launched in the name of 9/11 victims and their families. Indeed, the mainstream media failed to give voice to the peacemakers and antiwar critics who predicated the inevitable folly, crucial voices that I’m afraid have been proven right by the course of history.

But for this post I didn’t want to focus on politics. Rather, I wanted to share with you a clip from a film that I feel is one of the most powerful polemics against political violence I’ve ever seen. It comes from the Italian film Buongiorno, notte (Good Morning, Night), directed by Marco Bellocchio (who, BTW, won last night’s lifetime achievement award at the Venice Film Festival). Unfortunately there are no subtitles, so I will have to set it up for you.

The film is about when Italian Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, was kidnapped in 1978 by the Red Brigades, a left-wing terrorist group. The movie depicts the 55 days of his captivity in Rome, focusing on his captors, four young brigadistas, and their relationship with the imprisoned Moro. The story zooms in on the conflicted brigadista, Anna Laura Braghetti, who is increasingly troubled by the fact that the Italian political establishment won’t negotiate a prisoner exchange–the condition for his release–which means that Moro will be sentenced to death by his captors and eventually murdered.

The clip I have posted above involves Braghetti (performed by Maya Sansa) reading Moro’s final letter to his wife. It is then ingeniously overlaid with a letter by a WWII partisan who was sentenced to death by the Nazis. She then has a shattering epiphany (1:50 in the clip) when she realizes that the senseless horror that is about to be inflicted on her captive is no different than the heartless political murders of the past. Bellocchio emphasizes this point by intercutting source footage of prisoner executions from the war. Cut to Pink FLoyd’s “Great Gig in the Sky,” for me it is one of cinema’s most poignant montages, a heartful rebuttal against the cold logic of terrorists and vengeful war machines.

I hope you have the patience to watch the entire clip. Even if you don’t understand the language, it is poetry in motion. Incidentally, it is possible to see a subtitled version of the film. If at all possible, I encourage you to watch it and learn more about this tragic moment in Italian history.

The above viral videos were made to promote the latest entry into the Planet of the Apes franchise, Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Historically the series is fundamentally a critique of human arrogance and anthropocentrism, and the trailer for this latest film seems to confirm this tradition, adding to the mix corporate maleficence as a source for our downfall.

So why, then, did the marketing geniuses at Fox come up with this horrendously racist ad campaign? The answer is quite simple: a lack of diverse perspectives and cultural sensitivity is still a core characteristic of the monied media monopolies. If there were actually African creatives as part of the brainstorming process, the repeated trope of out-of-control, psycho militants in the heart of Dark Africa would stop circulating through the mediasphere. As Roger Silverstone writes, media is a space of appearances. It gives voice to some perspectives, and leaves out others. It is rather shameful that smart, creative and intelligent Africans are not part of the design teams that craft media–not just for domestic consumption in the US–but for international markets. These kinds of images perpetuate imperial stereotypes that ultimately serve the domination of the global economy by white financiers.

Image source

The Social Network or How Heroic Rich White Guys and Their Asian Groupies Colonized Youth Culture…

OK, snarkiness aside, I think The Social Network is a very well-made film. David Fincher is a top notch director, and Aaron Sorkin, if you can get past his machine gun style of dialog and plot devices, are quintessential storytellers of our age, churning ironic cool, short-attention span aesthetics and multilevel storytelling into high art (at least of the technical variety). The Social Network is very much a hybrid of television, film and Internet cultural sensibilities, the kind celebrated by Steven Johnson in Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter.

But beyond the slick and entertaining aspects of the film, various subtexts reinforce myths about the Internet and capitalism that end up being a feel-good story for our system at a time when it is in profound crisis. Ultimately it serves as yet another propaganda device for the reality bubble of the global knowledge economy and its exploitation of youth culture. Unlike Fincher’s Fight Club, this film is a very pro-capitalist, lacking the P2P ethos and grassroots character of the Internet’s popularity, which mostly thrives in the absence of commerce.

(Soon to be changed through enclosure, however, no thanks in part to this kind of propaganda. In fact, you may want to check out Tim Wu’s The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, and his excellent WSJ editorial about media monopolies: “In the Grip of the New Monopolists: Do away with Google? Break up Facebook? We can’t imagine life without them—and that’s the problem.”)

First, there is the genre trope of the loan genius–Zuckerberg and his freewheeling alter-ego Sean Parker (founder of Napster and brilliantly played by Justin Timberlake)– who, despite the film’s title, are depicted as anti-social jerks in search of blow jobs, fame and big bucks. There’s little cultural context in terms of the financing behind Internet start-ups, nor does it explain the popularity of social networks beyond being a tool to get laid. Though the film accurately points out that cool can’t be marketed, it fails to explain why a 26 year-old can be worth $25 billion. Really, this needs to enter into the film, somehow.

An uncritical view into how an astronomically valued company that makes little money can only feed into the larger ideology that enables banks and the government to print worthless money while we as a people are reduced to pawns of finance and capital. The film never asks what it is that is being monetized by the Facebook economy, a very significant and important ethical question. At this point–not that anyone cares–Foucault is rolling in his grave. I don’t know if he could have imagined such wholesale voluntarism to surveillance and privacy mining. (Disclaimer: I have a Facebook account, so I’m guilty as charged.)

There is a snippet and comment about how Napster took down the record industry, which passes with little debate. Was it a bit of code that did it? What about people’s pre-existing social habits, or the dinosaur-like behavior of traditional media companies? And there is the famous scene from the movie in which Zuckerberg refuses to give his attention to a stuffy establishment lawyer, which reinforces the rebel-without-a-cause image of Internet entrepreneurs and capitalism’s need to constantly reinvent itself all-the-while keeping the basic system of monetary control intact.

The film’s ultimate subtext is that social network entrepreneurs are the new rock stars. Think about it. Instead of playing in a garage band, you and your friends band together to code a tool that will eventually get signed by the arbitrators of the new culture industry in Silicon Valley. Even the way Facebook spread was like a touring band–it expanded its base by encircling and entering into markets one campus at a time (in particular those schools that are at the core of the information economy). Rather than it be traditional record companies, here it is the buttoned down venture capitalists who thrive on personality cults to drive their new wares and the stock market as its engine of commerce. That it is driven by a sex crazed youth culture makes it that much juicier. As Sorkin said, “I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling…. What is the big deal about accuracy purely for accuracy’s sake, and can we not have the true be the enemy of the good?”

I admit I didn’t know much about Zuckerberg’s story before seeing the film, so upon checking out his Wikipedia page, I was surprised by the following quote: “For me and my colleagues, the most important thing is that we create an open information flow for people. Having media corporations owned by conglomerates is just not an attractive idea to me.” And, “The thing I really care about is the mission, making the world open.” The Wikipedia page paints Zuckerberg as a hacker. If this is really the case (it seems to be at least partially true), then this would have been a far more interesting subtext than the rock star one used in the film. Granted, there are hints of Zuckerberg’s hacker ethos, but no sense of history that puts hacking at the center of the story of the Internet’s growth, as opposed to venture capital. Either way, at the end of the day, the history of culture and capitalism is portrayed once again as something done by smart, rich white guys accompanied by their Asian groupies.

FYI, there is a great soundtrack from Trent Rezner, who, true to his DIY roots, offers several of the songs for free on his Website.

Avatar’s global meme about an irresponsible/greedy/childish culture slashing and burning a planetary intelligence has its analog on Earth. So if James Cameron kicked open the pop culture door for this idea to spread through the mediasphere, now it’s time for our world’s indigenous to speak for themselves. Enter the Kogi from Colombia, who ask us to listen with our hearts and minds to their urgent call for human sanity. By using film as their bridging tool, our “elder brothers” are co-authoring Aluna, There is No Life Without Thought, a documentary manifesto designed to wake us up, asking us to think differently about our idiotic and suicidal treatment of the world/selves/others.

As a good background article in the Guardian states,

“Footage of the Kogi conducting rituals beneath a spectacular tree is straight out of Avatar. ‘Avatar has done great work for this,’ (filmmaker Alan) Ereira says. ‘Twenty years ago, the Kogi were pushing on a wheel that had just started to turn. Now that wheel is really rolling and they are part of the zeitgeist.’”

Indeed, but the scene is not out of Avatar; the film scene is from Earth (let’s not mistake the map for the territory!). However, the point is well taken: the wheel is turning. But the Kogi and Avatar can only do so much. You have to help push the wheel, too, internally and in the world at large. The task is vast, but there is one small tidbit from the Guardian story that you might find useful. When asked why it is that the current world system has such strong destructive momentum, Kogi spokesperson Jacinto Zabareta replied,

“Habit… That ambition to have more doesn’t have a framework. It’s just a drive to accumulate. The habit is a competitive one. ‘What everyone else has I must have too, otherwise everyone else has power over me.’ The consequences are evident, but it doesn’t seem obvious to you… You can go and live in space, that’s fine, but you don’t seem to be able to go back to the understanding of how to live harmoniously with the earth. That’s something you’ve forgotten.’”

This insight concurs with the essence of Buddhist teachings about habits of mind that lead to unskilled and confused action in the world. Jacinto, I believe, is asking for a kind of mindfulness that relates to cognitive scientist Francesco J. Varela‘s call for Ethical Know-How: “the progressive, firsthand acquaintance with the virtuality of self.” What he means by this is the age-old problem of duality in which we fail to be mindful of how our thoughts are not embedded within a fictional self, but are the result of an interaction of the world which brings us into existence. Our minds are not isolated, but co-evolve with the world around us. The few statements of the Kogi I’ve read and heard in the trailer seem to imply the same: our thoughts are what bring forth the world. For evidence, look no further than the ecological nightmare our civilization has produced. All is made possible by our ideas, and is a projection of a destructive thought process that simply needs to be reigned in.

Want to change the world? Change your mind. Or at least how you conceive it.

It took months to arrive, but Inception finally screened in Italy this weekend. Here’s my take. There are spoilers here, but I assume everyone who’s interested has seen it by now.

Regardless of what anyone says, Inception is a good object to think with.

And I think Christopher Nolan is a clever filmmaker. Mind you, clever doesn’t always mean wise. But he has a knack for making films that can splinter your mind. Even the Batman franchise’s The Dark Night had some deep guano buried within its pyrotechnics. But is Inception the zeitgeist film it aspires to be?

I was about to write a ho-hum review when I realized that Nolan was a bit smarter that I had initially understood. He made an entirely self-referential film about implanting an idea in a stranger’s mind, and abracadabra, here we are talking about a film’s idea in our heads. It took a few days to gestate, but that’s one of the major points of the film: ideas don’t simply replicate, but cook on the back burner until the right conditions concoct something new. (Coincidentally, Steven Johnson has a video about his new book, which deals with this very issue.)

As I wrote about The Prestige way back when, I had noted that though the film was ostensibly about magicians on screen, in fact it was really about film as an act of magic. Likewise, Inception is about the consequences (and ultimately ethics) of trying to convince people to believe ideas that are implanted without their consent. The idea in question is the one DiCaprio’s character planted in his deceased wife’s mind: that the world isn’t real.

OK, so historically this is an old philosophical point that can be found in any Ancient Religions 101 course, but thanks to postmodernism and the persistence of mass mediation, the trope seems to circulate more readily (i.e. The Matrix, Truman Show, Videodrome, etc.).

As it should.

Inception makes the argument rather clinically, however, and certainly lacks the poetics of Plato or the Vedas. I also think we can agree the film is mostly un-dreamlike, unless you were trying to depict James Bond’s lucid dreaming skills. So why spend so much time debating Nolan’s realization of dream theory, or lack thereof?

What struck me more about the film was his exploration of how ideas spread, in particular the popular concept of memes. One of the better insights of the movie was the point that you can’t just implant an idea and expect it to work the way you want it to. Everyone has history and a context, so ideas won’t motivate anyone unless they have some kind of emotional charge. Isn’t this what advertising aspires to? Really, the best “extractor” for the job is Mad Men‘s Don Draper.

Inception’s take on memes is actually refreshing, because usually memes are treated far more mechanically, such as the view that an idea simply replicates itself like downloaded music files. At least in Inception, the way ideas digest has more complexity.

Curiously, ideas are the one thing that cannot be copyrighted. This is due to the public nature of them. It is very hard to trace the origins of an idea to a pure source, just like in the dream you cannot remember how you got where you are. Ideas are networked beyond the individual’s belief in a singular concept. So when it is proposed during the movie to make an “inception”–to implant an idea in a person’s dream so as to make him think it is his own–most believe it is impossible. The characters acknowledge that ideas really do not have a beginning, and in a sense aren’t real, at least in the tangible sense. The capitalist system likes to reify and commodify everything into things, but ideas evade enclosure. There is something about this notion similar to Buddhism, which speaks of thoughts as being like flames that light other flames. But try to capture fire and you get Prometheus and his eternal suffering.

No doubt, regardless of what is possible, “inception” is a marketer’s wet dream and will be the subject of lots of wasted money and human creativity. You can see evidence of it in peer-to-peer marketing and from brand managers who dream of colonizing mindshare by dropping little brand bombs here and there, hoping that they propagate and “stick.” But unlike viruses, marketing slogans and images are more like weeds. In our age of mass media we have to learn how to be good gardeners.

The difference between Inception and say a good PK Dick story (or even a Cronenberg film like eXistenZ) is that by the end, you really don’t know what was/is “real.” Though Inception‘s closing shot leaves you with a question (a good move, by the way… Luis Buñuel was always a big fan of leaving story elements open like a zen koan), I was not–spoiler alert–confused about whether or not DiCaprio was dreaming (nor did it really matter), unless that is, the overall metaphysical message is that life is but a dream. I think it hints at that possibility, but there are definitely other films where I’ve been left with a much deeper sense of unease about the groundless condition of the universe.

Ultimately Inception‘s hierarchical dream stages (dreams within dreams, kicking “up” levels, a bottom “limbo”) gave the dreamworld too much structure. Nonetheless, the film valiantly recapitulates the idea of lucid dreaming by offering us the vague possibility that a lifetime could indeed be a dream. If we can acknowledge who’s doing the dreaming, then we can have far more control over our lives. For example, the film offers us the vision of dreamers being dreamed within an architecture designed by multinational energy corporations. This is a scary kind of manipulation that can only be guarded by our projected antibodies (one of the film’s more intriguing concepts). No doubt, without proper mindfulness and training, we are vulnerable to being dreamed by interests that are not our own.

Wait a second… when watching the film, wasn’t Warner Bros. dreaming our dream for us, too? Or was it the director? Did we have a group dream in the theater?

Ice cream headache. If only we had the militarized mental antibodies of say… Dick Chaney. Scary thought.

I tend to think of dreaming as a consequence of growing new connections in the brain. Our minds attempt to fill in a groundless reality through a symbolic language of poetry, which is possible when our rational minds are turned off. During these moments we tap into the creative condition of the cosmos, maybe defaulting to its natural state. I can only guess.

The problem with Inception is that the dreams were far too logical and controlled, with the exception of the occasional train coming out of nowhere. But to impose a Hollywood narrative on a dream, well, that’s Hollywood. I think films by the likes of Maya Deren or Buñuel are far more successful at emulating the dream state and marrying the potential of film with the creative energy of the universe (and let us not forget the infinite possibilities of animation, such as Richard Linklater’s Waking LIfe or A Scanner Darkly). A Hollywood narrative, however, does offer us the experience of entering into another reality and temporarily believing that it is real–just like a dream– but so do books (good ones at least). This is a matter of master storytelling.

Frankly, The Prestige moved me far more, perhaps because its speculative reality and allusions to magic were philosophically more complex (and creepier). Plus, Bowie playing Testla is a far better coup than DiCaprio’s dream sleuth. However, I do like Ellen Page, and look forward to seeing her repertoire expand as her young career grows.

There was a small touch that I liked quite a bit. The main action takes place during an overseas flight. As I have argued in my discussion of Lost (chapter five in my book) and 2012, airplanes are the techno-dream bodies of our world. In pop culture they often represent the vehicles through which we travel the liminal realm between worlds. I thought it was symbolically appropriate that the major dream sequences took places during an intercontinental flight, the jetliner being a good metaphor for corporate media.

My final verdict? Part Citizen Cane (with its Rosebud moment), part PK Dick ( although light on the mindfrak quotient), part James Bond (skis, guns, fortresses and global corporate intrigue), and part self-reflexive magic trick. It is the latter characteristic I associate with Christopher Nolan, and will likely be his signature for years to come. In the end, the fact that we are having a broad cultural discussion about dreams is always a good thing, and even more so when we connect dreams with media. Ultimately because so many are talking about this film, it is the mark of successful art–to a degree. It was interesting and compelling enough that we didn’t ignore it.

Too bad Pi‘s Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) didn’t see “Nature By Numbers” (the first embedded video). Maybe he wouldn’t have gone insane! But then again, seeing the beauty and perfection of the cosmos’ sacred geometry has blow many a mind before. Including this one.

After hearing so much about Hurt Locker and its Best Picture award (I’ve always been intrigued by war movies), I thought I’d give it a whirl. For starters, this ain’t Apocalypse Now! or Full Metal Jacket, let alone even close to some of the better, more complex war films that delve into the distorted and demented politics of its leaders. In particular I’m thinking of Major Dundee by Sam Peckinpah, which is set during the so-called Indian Wars. Hurt Locker also lacks the psychological nuance of something like Terrence Malick’s brilliant The Thin Red Line.

Hurt Locker is neither adventurous nor cutting edge, and not much better aesthetically than a TV show like CSI. Ultimately it’s a really boring movie with bad dialogue that poorly fleshes out a series of tension and release sequences that draw on music video and video game aesthetics. It is full of cliches about poor American soldiers who cannot make sense of a chaotic environment not of their choosing as they enter the labyrinth of a surreal war landscape populated by an alien Other. Framed as an “American tragedy,” once again an invaded country becomes a purification drama for Hollywood’s liberal consciousness.

So I hope no one thinks Hurt Locker is a serious anti-war movie, because if this is what passes these days as war criticism, then the depoliticization of Iraq has truly succeeded to permeate the pop culture landscape.

Just compare, for example, the Americans–self-identified as “USA friendlies”– versus the zero-dimensional Iraqis who seem to have no history or personality beyond the usual tropes and stereotypes (see my list below). The only insight into how the other side thinks comes from an Iraqi professor who is allowed three lines of dialogue, one being that he is pleased to have the CIA in his home. Moreover, the film forces you to sympathize with the military every time they kill Iraqis. Army recruiters most love that.

The only hint of the film’s consciousness comes at the end of the movie. We transition from a closing shot in Iraq with kids throwing stones at the Americans to the returning soldier’s existential crisis at home when he faces a wall of cereal in a market– recalling the clash’s prescient protest song, “Lost in the Supermarket.” In the end, cleaning rain gutters is not as thrilling as war, so this middle class soldier–a cypher for our system– has to go back to Iraq because now he is addicted to the adrenaline of war–like our consumer economy. The last shot has him transformed as a technologically shielded man who lurches suicidally towards another bomb. Like our militarized system, he has lost his humanity.

Though the last shot is a pretty strong image, compare it to some of the dialog when two soldiers complain about the war. Soldier 1: “How do you deal with it?” Soldier 2: “I just don’t think about it.” Wow, heavy shit.

If “I fucking hate this place” and “Let’s get out of this fucking desert” are the strongest statements the film’s characters can make, then Hollywood is as spineless and addicted to the military as the Democrats. Because in the end, though Hollywood cast a guilt vote to make this their best picture, in the industry the war machine will continue to march unabated as a primary partner in the development of animation and other block-buster special effects technology to be prototyped for war training VR.

Ultimately I concur with Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles (a much better and more introspective book/picture than Hurt Locker), who wrote that there is no such thing as an anti-war movie:

There is talk that many films are antiwar, that the message is war is inhumane and look what happens when you train young American men to fight and kill, they turn their fighting and killing everywhere, they ignore their targets and desecrate the entire country, shooting fully automatic, forgetting they were trained to aim. But actually, Vietnam War films are all pro-war, no matter what the supposed message, what Kubrick or Coppola or Stone intended… [soldiers] watch the same films and are excited by them, because the magic brutality of the films celebrate the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills. Fight, rape, war, pillage, burn. Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man; with film you are stroking his cock, tickling his balls with the pink feather of history, getting him ready for his real first fuck. It doesn’t matter how many Mr. and Mrs. Johnsons are antiwar—the actual killers who know how to use the weapons are not. (pp. 6-7)

It seems to me that the film’s Best Picture award is driven by a sense of shame about the war– a need to feel and say something about it, but even in the Obama years no one (that is, anyone in a position of power) is willing to stand up and call the Iraq war for what it is: a crime against humanity. So when a dramatic film can make this case, then it will certainly get my vote. But I’m not holding out hope. At least not for it to be made by Hollywood.

Here is a quick an dirty laundry list of unoriginal war film tropes from Hurt Locker:

• Inane dialogue as indication that somewhat will die (also used in horror films).
• Kid Iraqi (“Beckham”–yawn) who learns American black slang (and sells DVDs) as symbol of the hybridized, Utopian future of Iraq.
• Zero-dimensional Iraqis except as The Horrible Evil Enemy Without Any Consciousness (unlike the technocratic warriors of America who kill with high technology but also have feelings of guilt).
• A cameo of the sadistic yahoo commander (we only get a momentary glimpse of him).
• War-stressed, PTSD soldier who doesn’t have the capacity (or stomach) to “hold it in,” and of course is the one character who gets wounded right before he is supposed to finish his tour.
• Veteran perverted by horrors of war harbors an idiosyncratic secret obsession.
• Strange and creepy intellectual analyst whose healing powers are over-shadowed by his naivety and lack of warrior purification (and of course is killed).
• Depersonalized death/massacre of the other/enemy.
• Spectacularized violence as cleansing ritual for do-gooder Americans.

Logorama is a world constructed entirely from brands. Amazing.

Winner of the 2010 Oscar for best short film. Well deserved!

CFV 426 – Avatar/Pocahontas Mashup FINAL VERSION from Randy Szuch on Vimeo.

The point was made previously on this blog, but this excellent mash-up makes more visible the parallels between Avatar and Pocahontas. It reflects how the cultural myth of romantic savages versus colonial war machine (or loss of innocence/ fall from grace) continually persists in popular culture. Because it is a product of an industrialized culture and the radical transformation of its place on Earth, the continued popularity and re-working of this theme should not be simplistically reduced to false-consciousness. Yes it’s true that it is a distorted picture and Native Americans are right to criticize the stereotypes that ossify their culture and flatten them. Additionally, it is fair to say this is a necessary myth for the colonial culture, so it is not innocent or immune from these idealogical critiques.

Nonetheless, Pat Breton points out in Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema that critics need to develop an ethical kind of intervention that doesn’t ignore the legitimate (and very real) response of the audience. Likewise, Adrain Par argues in her discussion of Dances With Wolves that the film’s popularity was working on both latent and manifest sensibilities, the latent coming from the primal and repressed, whereas the manifest derives strictly from our response to the storyline. She suggests that in order to transform our culture from militarism to sustainability, it is important to recognize the “affect” that comes from deep responses to media with transformative themes. I remember really being inspired by the film, but than “learned” to hate it after all the criticism. But since militaristic and mechanistic thinking is so prevalent in our society’s cultural output, we need to recognize that when the Primal Matrix asserts itself, it does trigger a genuine revival of Spirit.

In this sense, I believe Avatar represents a good case study. Yes we can dwell upon its simplistic genre recycling and tropes (as the above mash-up alludes to), but clearly there is a deeper emotional response emanating from the cultural feedback loop happening with this film (Adrian Ivakhiv has a good round up at his Immanence blog). I see similar signs of this when the cultural commons reveals itself through the emerging economic practices of the Web. Lawrence Lessig, Clay Shirky and Henry Jenkins all document how the audience is quite alive in its response to media. People engage in all kinds of creative and participatory practices that were not reflected by the older, hierarchical structure of media of yore. So we should stop thinking about the “dominant” media with old models (this is the plea from David’s Gauntlett’s Media Studies 2.0).

Participatory cultural behaviors are not new, nor did they ever go away. In the 20th Century we can go back to Dada and follow a line through various avant-garde cultural movements to punk and hip hop that show active and often resistant behavior working beneath (or occasionally blinking on) the radar of the culture industry (albeit the industry’s machinery has become a lot more ravenous when it comes to commodifying subcultures). But the way in which marketing constantly repurposes grassroots cultural expression is a healthy sign that 1) culture constantly adjusts in ways the resist domination and 2) marketers still depend on authenticity as a reference point. This is all a long-winded way of saying that rather than being a deadened populous walking around like zombies in a shopping mall simulacrum paved over a dead planet (as critics like Chris Hedges would have us believe), the spark of life (however dim it may be) still persists among us, and can be brightened when certain stories speak to our inner moral compass and its sense of justice. No wonder that Palestinians and indigenous peoples are drawing upon the Avatar meme to highlight their causes. The “Fall”‘s mythology can play a subversive role in changing the meaning of dominant symbols, serving as a kind of fulcrum that can shift the culture’s center of gravity into a new direction.

I’m hopeful from reading Jonah Sachs and Susan Finkelpearl (makers of Story of Stuff), who argue that the open secret of marketing’s past successes (such as the Marlborough Man and Volkswagen’s populist appeal) were based on powerful (visual) stories. Propaganda has also achieved such successes through promoting narratives like the Clash of Civilizations. In terms of the environment, scientific facts about the planet’s perilous state are not penetrating the populous to the same extent as the disinformation flak spread out by the oil industry whose simplistic screed have a way of guiding the discourse just enough to scramble the facts (“confuse and conquer!” was the surrealist manifesto we used to use back in college). But what the energy companies lack is a connection to the Primal Matrix (although now that I think about it, crude oil is essence of primal goo and the fact that we burn it is an interesting psychological response to our planetary Id). Movies like Avatar, on the other hand, draw upon the repressed within all of us, the billion dollar response of the buying public a good sign that it is strongly active.

I’m struck by a quote from Bill Moyer’s interviews with Joseph Campbell, who said, “The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.” If ads are the dreamlife of corporations, then perhaps films like Avatar are the dreamlife of the Planet. Which, of course, includes us.

I want to preface my comments by saying that I support the work of Doctors without Borders, and they were the first organization I donated to after the earthquake in Haiti. With that said, I was struck by the above poster I received in my email. It advertises a documentary about their work that will screen worldwide (click her for locations and more information). At first I thought it was just cheeky sales pitch for donations, framing the work of the organization within the narrative structure of an action film. The image reminded me a little of the Constant Gardener, in which Africa becomes the backdrop for purification of the white man’s soul (as is the case of the Western genre of film).

Now, I haven’t seen Living in Emergency, nor do I intend to demean the humanitarian work of Doctor’s Without Borders, but it’s also interesting to explore this kind of image politics played out by NGOs. This was tackled in Enjoy Poverty by Renzo Martens, a video that explores the commodification of poverty. He contrasts the amount of money paid to professional non-African photographers for documenting violence and suffering versus village photographers who document weddings and family events. He trains the local photographers to sell their images to press, but as you would expect, they are locked out of the market. There is one telling scene in which he brings the photographers to a Doctors Without Borders compound and informs the physicians that they want to photograph starving children so they can makes some money in the international media market. The doctors are outraged, but fail to see that when the press are invited for photo ops, this is what happens. The distinction between news and PR is contested through this intervention.

The Doctors Without Borders movie poster adds an additional dimension, which is the evolution of “pop politics.” In Italy this phenomena is more pronounced, though certainly not absent in other technological democracies. The central idea is that the line between politics and entertainment is erased so that the public sphere is transferred entirely to the realm of television. For example, Prime Minster Silvio Berlusconi becomes the host of the political variety show that mirrors television, and visa-versa. His ministers become show girls (literally several are former models and entertainers), and the two systems intertwine. Like the US, news programs become infotainment. Meanwhile, I have also recently seen car ads that are made to look like movie trailers. With the proliferation of reality TV shows and the tabloidization of the democratic sphere, the aesthetics of participation are blurred so that for anything to penetrate the general consciousness it is necessary to imitate a more familiar form of communication, such as TV. Even the Left plays this game. A leading critic is a comedian whose platform is monologs (likewise in the US Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert play the role of court jester), and a former leftist parliamentarian is on the gamedoc equivalent of Survivor.

This is where the Living in Emergence poster comes in. I can’t help but feel that it draws too strongly on pop politics by invoking the thrills and exoticism that you’d find in an action movie. The determined gaze of the (white) hero dominates the vulnerable and quasi-silhouetted figures of “dark” Africa. There’a a trend in film to depict the southern Other through an amber haze, using lens filters to position these places as if they exist in perpetual setting sunlight– in other words, as transition zones between the light of everyday life and the dark night of the soul (see Traffic, in particular). In Western discourse, usually Europe or the US serves as the stable (green) homeworld, whereas these distant colonial lands become the sites of psychological tests where the hero must find himself.

The flipside is Doctors Without Borders is trying to reach out to new audiences that are unfamiliar with difficult work of NGOs. By putting their work within the context of a familiar narrative structure it may be possible to attract younger people into a world they otherwise would dismiss as irrelevant or unexciting. Such is the state of mediated politics.