Sam Mendes’ 1917: A technological step forward, several ideological and artistic steps back
[dropcap]C[/dropcap]o-written by Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns, the movie concerns two young British soldiers on a mission to halt an attack by a British battalion. That offensive would fall into a German ambush leading to the possible destruction of the unit.
While the film graphically shows some of the horrors of trench warfare, it fails to indict those responsible for the carnage and is oblivious to the war’s socio-historical context. To put it bluntly, 1917 does not qualify as an anti-war film.
In fact, the movie, treating one of the titanic events of modern times, is largely conventional and intellectually shallow. Fully accepting national divisions and enmities, it opens the door to British and other patriotisms. While 1917 is something of a technological tour-de-force, ideologically it represents a significant regression from anti-war films on the subject of World War I such as Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion (1937) and Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957), as well as Peter Jackson’s 2018 documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old.
Mendes’ movie opens in Northern France on April 6, 1917 and unfolds over a 24-hour period. Two young British lance corporals, Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Will Schofield (George MacKay), receive instructions from General Erinmore (Colin Firth) about a high-risk mission to get a message to a British battalion planning to attack German forces, believed to be in retreat.
Aerial intelligence has learned that the Germans are not retreating but have only made a tactical withdrawal in order to ensnare their enemy. With communication lines cut, Tom and Will must hand-deliver an urgent message to the 2nd Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment to call off their planned offensive. Some 1,600 lives are at stake, including that of Tom’s brother.
Passing through British trenches strewn with damaged and war-weary soldiers, many of them boys, the duo cross No Man’s Land, reaching abandoned German bunkers. A rat trips a wire, causing the tunnels to collapse, burying Will alive. Rescued by Tom, the pair continue their journey through a hellish landscape of rotting, bloated corpses, blown-up artillery, bombed-out buildings. It is destruction on an almost unimaginable scale and scope.
The lesson of 1917 is that bloated artifice can never replace genuine art.
During their perilous expedition, the more cynical Will tells the naive Tom that he traded a combat medal he won for a bottle of wine (“It’s just a bloody bit of tin”). But when tragedy strikes, Will becomes an unstoppable fighting machine. He is warned by a captain (Mark Strong) to “make sure there are witnesses,” when he delivers the message to halt the attack, because “some men just want the fight.”
In considering 1917 as a whole, it should be noted, first of all, that while Mendes’ grandfather, the future writer Alfred Hubert Mendes, carried a message through hazardous territory in 1917 during the mutual mass slaughter known as the Battle of Passchendaele (in which hundreds of thousands of British, French, German, Canadian, New Zealand, Australian, Indian, South African and Belgian soldiers died pointlessly), the “life-saving” character of the mission and the personal element (the desire to save a brother) are entirelyinvented. The film has a melodramatically manipulative character from the outset.
Moreover, the title, 1917, displayed in large typeface in the film’s advertising campaign, is bombastic and even deceptive. For much of the world’s population, its most politically conscious elements certainly, “1917” is identified primarily with the October Revolution in Russia, the event that, above all, helped bring about the end of the bloody madhouse of the imperialist war. If not for the Russian Revolution and the threat of revolution elsewhere (the German Revolution erupted in November 1918), the various Great Powers would have carried on the death and devastation, resulting in even more catastrophic human suffering. Whether intentionally or not, the titling of the film is an effort to “reclaim” the year 1917 for the cause of national honor, patriotism and military valor.
Leaving the October Revolution aside, the title is disproportionate to the story it tells, which hardly encompasses even the purely military side of the conflict in 1917. The movie’s principal strength is its remarkable cinematography (Roger Deakins), creating an exhausting two hours of terrifying war imagery. As previously noted, the spectator is overwhelmed by visuals and unimpressed by the historical analysis. While there is sympathy for the British casualties, there is none for the German victims. In one scene, Will and Tom try to minister to a gravely wounded German fighter and pay dearly for their merciful efforts. It is a historical fact that the biggest danger to the British soldiers, in the end, came from their own commanding officers and ruling elite.
The unceasing, tension-filled momentum of the film serves to conceal its essential lack of ideas or criticism. Alonso Duralde at The Wrap noted legitimately that “the movie is more successful as a thriller than as a thoughtful examination of war and its horrors; Mendes seems less interested in bigger ideas about the nightmare of battle and its effects on his characters than he is in Hitchcockian audience manipulation.” Duralde contrasted 1917 with “tales like Paths of Glory or Gallipoli [Peter Weir, 1981] or [Renoir’s] La Grande Illusion, which used the conflict as a way to discuss class or military injustice or the last gasp of the European aristocracy.”
Along those lines, it is worth recalling director Jean Renoir’s comments in his autobiography: “If a French farmer should find himself dining at the same table as a French financier, those two Frenchmen would have nothing to say to each other, each being unconcerned with the other’s interests. But if a French farmer meets a Chinese farmer they will find any amount to talk about. This theme of the bringing together of men through their callings and common interests has haunted me all my life and does so still. It is the theme of La Grande Illusionand it is present, more or less, in all my works.”
Mendes’ movie never asks who was responsible for one of the most barbaric episodes in world history, a calamity that resulted in some 40 million civilian and military casualties, including an estimated 22 million dead.
In fact, 1917 ’s one political comment on the war comes when a British general utters “The only one way this war ends … is the last man standing.” The claims that the film’s depiction of numerous atrocities makes it an anti-war work are spurious, as is the case in regard to various contemporary movies on the subjects of the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, Lions for Lambs, Mendes’ own Jarhead, etc.).
It is entirely possible to picture the awfulness of such conflicts—particularly as they affect one’s “own” side—and still insist, or imply, that such conflicts are necessary, inevitable, or, once begun, have to be “carried through to the end” in the national interest. The uncritical, narrowly focused treatment of the immediate “facts” of the war in 1917 helps plant it firmly in the pro-British establishment camp.
Media accounts suggest that Mendes and Wilson-Cairns, described as a “a World War I buff,” were unserious in their approach to the deeper, starker meaning of the events depicted in 1917. Indiewire describes Mendes—appointed a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 2000 and only recently knighted, and fresh from directing two empty-headed James Bond extravaganzas (Skyfall and Spectre)—and Wilson-Cairns spreading maps “showing front line locations in April 1917” on the “London kitchen table where Mendes perfected Skyfall .”
Indie wire continues: “The writers figured out where the French towns were, then traced—and timed—the treacherous route the two infantrymen would take on foot, throwing in incidents and stories they had each picked up over the years.”
There is no indication that Mendes and Wilson-Cairns carried out substantive historical research into the processes that made the ghastly situation in 1917possible, much less consulted critics of war and imperialism.
If they had, they might have learned that not everyone conceives of the bloody inferno of World War I as a clash between the “good” British and the “evil” Germans, the conception the film leans toward. As the WSWS explained in November 2018, the 1914-18 war was not fought, as the British authorities propagandized, “to defend the right of small nations against the depredations of Germany.” Nor was it fought for any of the self-serving, lying justifications provided by the other belligerents, Germany, France, Austria, Russia or the US.
The relentless blasting of the guns, the senseless mass slaughter in what was later to be falsely labeled the “war to end all wars” or the war to “make the world safe for democracy,” was pursued for the sake of markets, profits, resources, colonies and spheres of influence.” Mendes’ “epic” film has no interest in such matters.
Ricky Gervais’ (Biting) Monologue – 2020 Golden Globes
[dropcap]R[/dropcap]icky Gervais may be kissing his big time career good-bye with this monologue (which clearly made many VIPs uncomfortable), but I guess the man had to get it off his chest, and he did. Seeking truth to a roomful of egotists accustomed to sycophants is risky business.
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Doris Day, prominent postwar American actress and singer, dies at 97
[dropcap]D[/dropcap]oris Day, the film actress and singer, died Monday at 97 from pneumonia in Carmel Valley, California. Day was one of the most prominent American performers in film and music of the 1950s and ’60s. She largely retired more than four decades ago.
She became immensely popular (by certain calculations, the most popular female film star of all time) in a series of romantic comedies, including Pillow Talk (1960), Lover Come Back (1961), That Touch of Mink (1962), The Thrill of It All (1963) and Move Over, Darling (1963), opposite Rock Hudson, Cary Grant and James Garner. However, her most compelling performances came before that in films such as Young Man with a Horn (1950), Love Me or Leave Me (1955) and, above all, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).
For decades, Day has been a culturally polarizing figure. The mere mention of her name causes some to sneer, whereas, in part a response to that type of snobbery, another category of commentators offers nearly uncritical adulation. A more objective, historical approach is needed.
Day’s life and career reflect the contradictory character and development of postwar popular culture and American life more generally. On the one hand, she expressed in her early and middle period the energy and optimism of a generation deeply relieved that the Depression and World War were over and looking forward to the future. The period permitted or even encouraged what James Cagney, with whom Day starred in Love Me or Leave Me (1955), approvingly termed the actress’ “ability to project the simple, direct statement of a simple, direct idea without cluttering it.”
On the other hand, the unraveling of the economic boom and the political conditions that accompanied it, marked by the civil rights movement and the inner-city riots, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the widening and disastrous intervention in Vietnam, led to a situation where by the late 1960s the continuing, unrealistic cheerfulness and embalmed morality of her films seemed inappropriate and uninteresting to new generations.
By 1968, Day was starring in such bland, oblivious fare as Where Were You When the Lights Went Out? and With Six You Get Eggroll. Those were her last two feature films.
In a country where film and music remain in the hands of a money-making apparatus that operates on the basis of the crudest pragmatic calculations, such abrupt (and sometimes cruel) shifts are almost inevitable. Doris Day became the victim of a particularly sharp change, in both popular mood and entertainment industry requirements, which led to her self-exile.
Day was born Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her father was a music teacher and her mother also had an interest in music. While recuperating, at 15, from a leg injury that put an end to her hopes of becoming a dancer, Day began to sing along to the radio, she explained later, and to American jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald in particular. She told A. E. Hotchner, with whom she wrote a memoir, that there was a quality to Fitzgerald’s voice “that fascinated me, and I’d sing along with her, trying to catch the subtle ways she shaded her voice, the casual yet clean way she sang the words.”
By 17, Doris Day was singing with one of the most popular bands in the US, led by Les Brown. At 18, she was divorced from a violently abusive husband and had a son. As various commentators have noted, she came of age during the Depression and, above all, valued working as hard as possible, earning money of her own and somehow keeping afloat.
In 1945, she came to prominence as a vocalist when her version of Sentimental Journey struck a chord with a population weary of war and yearning to get on with life. It describes a long-awaited, long-delayed journey home by train. “Got my bag, got my reservation / Spent each dime I could afford / Like a child in wild anticipation / Long to hear that ‘All aboard.’” It was an enormous hit.
Another biographer, Tom Santopietro, suggests Day was “the perfect embodiment of post-World War II America, when problems were deemed solvable with a little determination and a lot of straightforward thinking.”
In 1947, Day auditioned for the remarkable Hungarian-American director Michael Curtiz (Casablanca, Mildred Pierce). Although—or because—she confessed to him she had absolutely no acting experience, Curtiz was charmed by her and urged her not to take acting lessons. Somehow, in the midst of all the other films he was making, including major works (Flamingo Road, The Breaking Point), Curtiz managed to direct Day four times.
The most substantial of those is Young Man with a Horn, loosely inspired by the short and tragic life of jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke (1903–1931). Kirk Douglas plays the lead character Rick Martin and Day is singer Jo Jordan, but Juano Hernandez as Art Hazzard, the black trumpeter who tutors and advises Martin and whom the latter reveres, has the greatest impact in the film by far. The work is unusual for its integration of black and white characters.
Editor's Note: A compassionate individual to a fault, Doris Day was also one of the earliest and most prominent Hollywood celebrities to embrace the cause of animal rights, to which she dedicated much of her time and financial support during her decades away from the screen. This she did along with much charity work for human causes, even if that aspect was largely kept out of the headlines. —PG
Day is lively in Calamity Jane (1953), a silly musical set in the Old West and directed by David Butler, also with Howard Keel. With her physical comedy and unpretentiousness, she endears herself to the audience. Also in her “tomboyish” phase, she climbs under an automobile and repairs it, to the discomfort of boy friend Gordon MacRae, in By the Light of the Silvery Moon (1953, also David Butler), a musical inspired by Booth Tarkington stories.
Young at Heart (Gordon Douglas, 1955), a remake of Four Daughters (1938) with John Garfield and Claude Rains, is a relatively somber work. Frank Sinatra plays the cynical, world-weary Barney Sloane, who enters the life of the musical Tuttle family (this time with three daughters) and falls for Day, who is engaged to his friend. Notably, Sinatra performs a memorable version of the Gershwin tune, “Someone to Watch Over Me,” while Day’s character gazes at him with ferocious concentration.
In Love Me or Leave Me, a biographical musical set in Chicago in the 1920s, James Cagney is gangster Martin Snyder and Day, singer Ruth Etting. Etting works as a “dime-a-dance” girl (the real Etting began in a brothel) who comes to the attention of Snyder. He decides to further her career, but expects sexual favors in return. She refuses, but Snyder continues to be interested in her and her career. Etting is in love with her accompanist, piano player Johnny Alderman (Cameron Mitchell), which eventually spurs Snyder to violence. Day’s rendition of “Ten Cents a Day” is remarkable for its anger and sensuality. Anyone convinced of Day’s “sexless” and “virginal” personality is likely to be disabused.
In Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, the finest film in which Day appeared, she and James Stewart are a “typical” middle class American couple vacationing in Morocco. Inadvertently, they become aware of an assassination set to take place in London. Their child is kidnapped to keep them silent.
Stephen Whitty (The Alfred Hitchcock Encyclopedia) observes that Day conveys “a real feeling of anguish and loss as the parent of a kidnapped child; a true feeling of betrayal, too, at an emotionally distant husband who has stopped her [singing] career and at one point even doses her with sedatives without her knowledge.”
Beyond that, at the film’s crucial moment, Day’s character has to choose between protecting her son and preventing a political tragedy with presumably large-scale implications, including potentially the deaths of a great many people. Critic Robin Wood noted the characteristically “Hitchcockian moralquality” of the suspense, which is “the outward projection of the agonising conflict within the heroine’s mind.” That sort of dilemma clearly emerged from the situations great numbers of people had faced under fascist and totalitarian regimes in the 1930s and 1940s. It is a scene of tremendous tension and Day carries it off beautifully.
The romantic comedies of the late 1950s and ’60s are gradually less interesting and appealing. There are amusing bits in them, with Hudson, Garner and Tony Randall in particular. Of course, the notion that Day was responsible for her name becoming a “byword for coy, pre-Pill prudery and out-of-touch morality,” in Tamar Jeffers McDonald’s phrase, is unfair. Day had little say in what relentlessly conformist themes Hollywood was promoting, even as the ground underneath the film industry’s feet—and the general condition in the US—was become less and less stable.
Nell Beram at Bright Lights Film Journal points out that “Day detested her virginal image. She knew that ‘a ‘Doris Day movie’ had come to mean a very specific kind of sunny, nostalgic, sexless, wholesome film.’… In her book [with Hotchner] she says, ‘I have the unfortunate reputation of being Miss Goody Two-Shoes, America’s Virgin, and all that, so I’m afraid it’s going to shock some people for me to say this, but I staunchly believe no two people should get married until they have lived together.’ She loathed the pristine image in part because it was a lie—she was against artifice… and in part because the image was impossible for someone with her biography to live up to.” That “biography” included several unhappy marriages and a bankruptcy that resulted from her and her husband being swindled out of their money.
Film critic Molly Haskell wrote intriguingly about and interviewed Day in the mid-1970s. She came to Day’s defense when the former movie star was not in favor with what Haskell termed the “cultural arbiters.” Those detractors were responding, the critic wrote, to the image of “the superannuated virgin of the sexless sex comedies, protected by cameras coated with seven veils of Vaseline from growing old before our eyes. With the aid of the rejuvenating techniques at the disposal of the film industry and her sunny inviolability, Doris Day would seem to remain forever a girl on the brink of experience.”
Haskell argued, however, that “the image of the eternal virgin is one-sided. At the same time, Day was challenging, in her workingwoman roles, the limited destiny of women to marry, live happily ever after, and never be heard from again. The fate of women to contract spiritually and finally to disappear into the miasma of male fantasies, as they did on the screen in the sixties, was one to which she would not resign herself.”
There is some truth to these points, and the fashionable, hedonistic taste-makers of the 1960s and beyond, for whom thoughtless violence and sexuality became a cheap, marketable reflex, proved to be no more on a valid or substantial path than Day with her “wholesomeness.” Nonetheless, there is something undeniably exhausted and stale about Send Me No Flowers (1964, Norman Jewison), The Glass Bottom Boat (1966, Frank Tashlin) and Day’s other late films.
One suspects the actress will be remembered, above all, for the energy, independence, unselfishness and humor she displayed in her film work in the early and mid-1950s.
Death of the Art House Revolution
Can the Americanized West ever stage a real rebellion?
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he great religious fabulist Billy Graham once crooned to his audience of wide-eyed acolytes, “I’ve read the last page of the Bible. It’s all going to turn out all right.” The assembled flock then fell into a rousing rendition of, “How Great Thou Art.” Ah, to have such simple-minded faith. This is evidently what we long for, after all, the credulous faith of children. And you don’t have to cast your gaze back to the Nile River Valley or the saline shores of the Dead Sea to discover the human proclivity for savior motifs. Just check the nearest cinema signage or streaming app. From Westeros to Wonder Woman, the public seems to have a bottomless appetite for saviors sweeping in to save civilization--or perhaps to purge it of its more unflattering excrescences. Through the nimbus of a nacreous sky, out of a thick wood, cresting over the roiling waves, dredged up from the sea floor, every corner of the planet has been ransacked for sources of redemption, while the tinseltown scribes continue to scribble their visions of apocalypse. The urge to be saved and the fear of Armageddon come together to a screen near you every six months or so. There’s an odd kind of mutualism at work between the Cassandras and Christ-figures.
Consider that since 2008, the filmic output of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has grossed more than seven billion dollars. Mind you, this is not DC Comics, so no Superman, Batman, or Aquaman. This is Black Panther, Spider-Man, Thor, Avengers, X-Men, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, and so forth. And don’t kid yourself. These days it is mostly adults flocking to the theaters in anxious anticipation of how their childhood heroes will rescue the world from the latest miscreant or megalith or monstrosity. For its part, DC Comics has grossed some five billion with its Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Justice League, and Suicide Squad fare, but DC also reaches back into the Seventies, when Christopher Reeve was inhabiting the Clark Kent attire. Marvel commands the throne of comic-book fantasy at the moment. And Disney has some 20 new film slotted into the starting gate in the next few years.
In many respects what all this superhero cinema reveals is the startling infantilism of the American mind. Benjamin Barber foresaw this some years ago in his excellent cultural exposition, Consumed. The infantilization of the American masses produces the ideal state for consumption: blissfully ignorant and driven by impulsive desires and fears, largely uninformed by any evaluative research let alone the consequences of spending. The critical faculties of adults are absent in the infantile consumer. Surely adults that continually appease their fears (or boredom) with fantasies of caped crusaders rescuing the sheeple from certain destruction participate in this sophomoric recidivism. This is not to say there isn’t plenty of good product out there to enjoy. There is, but it is rather to suggest that our level of indoctrination is such that any thought of radical revolution, real rebellion, is almost immediately derailed or redirected into consumer escapes.
Editor's Note: The author could not be more correct in fingerism runaway infantilism and the constant pressures to further infantilisation as one of America's most noxious and least examined cultural traits. From the cradle on up Americans are injected with the fairytale notion that beauty, physical power and impressive height are all ineluctable components of goodness and heroism. The pervasive obsession with heightism is clear in many professions and social fields, especially politics. Being short is almost always a disqualifier for men in US politics or in the corporate boardrooms, especially high office. A Napoleon, a Macron or even a Julius Caesar ("only" 5'9") would have had a tough time in the US where US presidents and top executives usually exceed 6 feet. Short men with tall wives is also an unusual sight in America, but commonplace in Italy and France, for example, not to mention Japan or China, where height is rarely regarded as a tacit requirement for excellence in personal or social affairs. Hollywood has exploited and accentuated this assumption, even if, ironically, some of the industry's most charismatic players—Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Alan Ladd, Gene Kelly— were all under 5' 9". Meanwhile, even very tall men, feeling insecure, used lifts or stuffed their boots to appear taller. John Wayne, a natural 6' 4" did that routinely. Growing up is something Americans are not very good at.—PG
It is instructive to see the disposable dollars we fling into the coffers of Hollywood, because we do not put nearly that amount of money or time into producing authentic change for the tens of millions of us who labor beneath the extractive engines of neoliberal capitalism. Rather than construct real transformation, we opt for escapism. Our revolutions happen on cinema screens rather than side streets. Perhaps the scope and reach of the neoliberal world is too large a task, so that it stuns us into inaction. For our vantage point, the exploitation economy rolls over the horizons of our vision, no end in sight. But imagine if just half that movie money had been poured into the coffers of a socialist third party. Or a party that simply insisted that public needs be solved by socialist government ‘intervention’ rather than some shoddy pretext of market efficiency. Instead, Bernie Sanders has to flood your inbox with hectoring prophecies of doom just to scrape together a pile of $27 donations to run his campaign.
Rather than construct real transformation, we opt for escapism. Our revolutions happen on cinema screens rather than side streets. Perhaps the scope and reach of the neoliberal world is too large a task, so that it stuns us into inaction. For our vantage point, the exploitation economy rolls over the horizons of our vision, no end in sight.
On some level, it’s understandable. You don’t have to deconstruct why we are often satisfied to place our faith in entertaining fictive solutions rather than engage in the tedious ‘years of struggle’ repeatedly called for by the likes of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, who understood the grim realities of political transformation. The lined faces of lifetime activists serve as testaments to the cut and thrust of battle against the depredations of faceless multinationals and their ever-growing databases of information, through which struggles are defused and disarmed. From mobile phones, from fiber lines, from five-eyed satellites, from wirelines, from surveillance cams innocuously hung from every string of traffic signals. But is it simply the scale of the job that keeps us from banging pots in the streets like Argentines before they threw the parasitical IMF from their country, or like Venezuelans rallying behind an embattled administration because it represents a movement whose colors they proudly wear? Or, of course, like the emergency-clad French who turn out in the public square week after week despite increasing repression. Are we fatally distracted? Or is it our creature comforts that dissuade us?
The Bourgeois Revolt
British novelist JG Ballard published Millennium People in 2001, a novel about a middle-class rebellion in London’s fictive Chelsea-Marina neighborhood. Darkly comic, but with serious questions at its core, the novel suggested a seemingly absurd concept, that people who enjoyed a modicum of material comfort would ever stage a rebellion. Ballard said at the time, “People are telling me the book made them laugh out loud. Terrific! But it also suggests how brainwashed the middle-class is that it considers the very idea of a rebellion to be laughable.”
The leader of the bourgeoisie revolution is a film lecturer at a local college, Kay Churchill. She rails against the declining fortunes of middle-class life. When narrator David Markham wryly comments that London’s wealthier enclaves, “...looks very pleased with itself. No sign of rickets, scurvy or leaking roofs” Churchill sets him straight, “Salaries have plateaued. There’s the threat of early retirement…(we’re) all locked into huge mortgages. People have sky-high school fees, and banks breathing down their necks….Knowledge-based professions are just another extractive industry. When the seams run out we’re left high and dry with a lot of out-of-date software. Believe me, I know why the miners went on strike.”
Her group of bourgeois revolutionaries see education as a vast brainwashing institution, but also travel, which is another pacifying agent designed to suppress more radical instincts in the middle class. “All the upgrades in existence lead to the same airports and resort hotels, the same pina colada bullshit. The tourists smile at their tans and their shiny teeth and think they’re happy. But the suntans hide who they really are--salary slaves.”
She also declaims on the infantilizing character of Hollywood, refusing to acknowledge even the value of film noir. Listing her favorite films, Markham asks,
“No American films?”
“I don’t like comic strips.”
“Film noir?”
“Black is a very sentimental colour. You can hide any rubbish behind it. Hollywood flicks are fun, if your idea of a good time is a hamburger and a milk shake. America invented the movies so it would never need to grow up. We have angst, depression and middle-aged regret. They have Hollywood.”
Bumptious, then Bought Off
The question at the heart of this novel is one we might still pose to ourselves, even as wage stagnation and plummeting purchasing power rile larger and larger elements of the populace. Will a slight elevation of conditions, a watered-down New Deal, green, gold, or silver, keep our revolutionary instincts at bay? That’s what Bernie Sanders proposes. A return to FDR government programs designed to create jobs and pull a majority out of economic insecurity. But such a program, though initially helpful, will inevitably be attacked by capital. Read Alex Carey’s Taking the Risk Out of Democracy for a look at how quickly and earnestly business ramped up campaigns to savage labor and ultimately unwind the programs designed to benefit them. As David Harvey has said, capitalism will ultimately cannibalize its own source of wealth. Will this sort of New Deal policymaking be a step forward, or backward lurch, for socialism, as many said the ACA was, a kind of generational punt on true healthcare reform?
What German author Florian Cord notes in his excellent work on Ballard is how he depicts the ways in which resistance movements are ultimately incorporated into the capitalist system, and then commodified and sold to lapdog consumers ready for their next fix. What so easily happens is, as Cord writes, “...revolution is entirely reduced to its material dimension. By presenting themselves as responsive to some of the concrete grievances that initially started the revolt, the authorities cleverly transform these into the sole matter of contention and utterly cast aside its much more important ideological dimension.”
Proposals for this kind of incorporation abound, for the very reasons mentioned earlier, that the working class has been offshored and automated into desperate straits, while the middle-class have lost their privileges in similar fashion. Only when conditions deteriorate far enough for the populace to appear threatening to elites--only then are ameliorative proposals countenanced. Sanders New Dealism, trendy candidate Andrew Yang’s $1,000 monthly supplement to consumer bank accounts, Obamacare, etc. These are all forms of pacification in the interest of salvaging the established order, status quo neoliberal capitalism. By addressing the concrete, the ruling class sidesteps the ideological. French elitist Emmanuel Macron has tried this very thing with the Gilets Jaunes, hoping to fob them off with a wage lift here, a canceled tax there. Pacify the insurgents, and never address the core protest, which is against the capitalist ideology itself. Thus far it hasn’t worked on the multi-sectional insurgents of the French uprising. But it has worked here far too many times. Interesting how much of the antiwar anger of the bourgeoisie, stirred up by the Vietnam War, fairly well vanished once the draft was abolished. A nice cultural analogue might be this: the day Pearl Jam appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, the grunge movement was doomed, its outsider angst soothed by incorporation. A nascent rebellion strangled in its crib. In Millennium People, the revolt fizzles out, and Kay is ultimately welcomed into the intelligentsia, produces a documentary about the aims of the Chelsea-Marina rebellion, and becomes gainfully employed by the MSM, which commodifies her edginess and markets it to the masses.
The Dilemma
The word ‘dilemma’ could be visualized as a determined matador standing before an angry bull, dusting the arena floor with an impatient hoof. He faces two horns, neither an inviting prospect. The dilemma asks which horn you would rather be speared with. So it seems with our American political prospects. We’re faced with two barriers. First, the need for a broadly cast recognition that New Dealism is a stopgap solution that will be instantly sabotaged by capital, forcing labor to wage war simply to retain what insufficient victories it won within the capitalist system. It is a de facto bribe from the stakeholders of the status quo, a pacifier for a choleric infant. Second, there is the vast mystification of socialism and any kind of government planning or intervention, the mere idea of which sends half the population into spirals of seething contempt. It is likewise largely unknown that socialism is not a path to tyranny and slaughter, but a sane and humane program for human development, one that, in its very essence, combines the demands of our Machiavellian identity politics liberals. And there we are: on the one hand, hush money; on the other, a stifling hallucination.
How far does our standard of living have to fall before the mass of people stage a revolution? How far does the fading middle-class have to fall before they join in? As the Kaiser Report’s Max Kaiser points out, “You have a situation where people in America have no money, and house prices are skyrocketing relative to their wages, but the government says that’s not inflation. Healthcare costs are galloping ahead, ten to fifteen percent a year inflation, but the government says that’s not inflation.” The federal government couldn’t care less about healthcare or housing or asset price inflation. But it cares deeply about the threat of wage inflation. Wages have risen five percent since 1960 while rents have risen 61 percent.
The question then becomes, if the situation becomes dire enough, and a critical mass of people rebel, can they be quickly bought off? Or will they reject every sweetener and finally capsize capitalism itself, and begin the project of building socialism? There are decades of indoctrination that militate against this prospect. Yet France looks to be a modern hothouse experiment in a cross-section of class interests challenging the neoliberal regime.
What Ballard’s book doesn’t tackle is the possibility that ‘first world problems’ like rising utility bills and heavy property taxes are minuscule set next to the depredations our capitalist governments visits on foreign nations--the overwhelming violence of resource wars led by Washington and London and Paris--and that this contrast, and the startling reality of the latter, might prove a fusible and durable raison d'être for political action. Or maybe that, too, is too remote a reality for our insular, attention-deficit West to embrace. Unless, perhaps, it became a cause célèbre, fatality figures blazoned across well-designed pennants carried by Bono, Beyoncé, and George Clooney through Bel Air, their fierce protests breathlessly reported by Variety and TMZ, and quickly optioned by Disney for its next summer blockbuster.
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ORPHANED TRUTHS—Two antipodal voices denounce Assange’s arrest
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JIMMY DORE explains the sordid background to Assange's betrayal by Ecuador. Moreno is a Judas, no doubt, but it takes two to tango, and his partners are in Washington.
The Jimmy Dore Show
Published on Oct 1, 2018
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TUCKER CARLSON zeroes in on the "real crimes" committed by Assange, like embarrassing the powerful by publicizing their normally hidden ugly deeds. The BIG good, the silver lining, in having a prominent voice sitting on Fox News telling it like it is, is that whatever truths Tucker Carlson is able to impart, they will be reaching a working class audience in desperate need of getting some semblance of reality into their badly disinformed heads.
Fox News • Published on 11 Apr 2019
The Duran
Tucker Carlson puts Assange’s deeds and arrest in perspective [Video]
Tucker Carlson stands almost alone in telling the truth about Julian Assange, both what he did – and did not do.
Fox News’ Tucker Carlson offered his own analysis regarding the arrest of Julian Assange. Mr. Assange was arrested yesterday, April 11, 2019, after the Ecuadoran Embassy agreed to evict him from their building in London where he lived over the last seven years, a refugee from the American and Western European governments.
This was extensively reported by the mainstream press, but it was done so dishonestly. Tucker Carlson puts the facts back into the equation with his presentation:
Probably the central comment and the central truth of Mr. Assange’s life and work is summed up at [01:54], and we reprint it here:
First, Julian Assange embarrassed virtually everyone in power in Washington. He published documents that undermined the official story of the Iraq War and Afghanistan. He got Debbie Wasserman-Schulz fired from the DNC. He humiliated Hillary Clinton by showing that the Democratic primaries were, in fact, rigged.
Pretty much everyone in Washington has reason to hate Julian Assange. Rather than just admit that straightforwardly, “he made us look like buffoons, so now we are sending him to prison!”
However, those who are not in Washington have every reason to praise this man for revealing such truths.
However, as Mr. Carlson goes on to say, the use of the two-year “Russian interference / collusion / conspiracy / (add your own term here)” narrative had its blank filled in here with “Julian Assange was a Russian agent.”
This is simply not true. And of course, who better to spread a lie than Senator Richard Blumenthal, who is known as “Da Nang Dick” because he lied to make himself appear to have served in Viet Nam, rather than the truth, which was that his five deferments prevented him from going overseas, and he served his time in the Marines as a Reservist in Washington D.C. and Connecticut, never actually fighting in the war.
In the video we see him at his customary wordplay, spinning more falsehoods about Mr. Assange.
The entirety of Mr. Carlson’s video is remarkably accurate and honest. It is good to know that there is at least one pretty decent journalist operating in the the US. However, the spin doctors have been in control for a long time, and it is apparent from this development that “Russian collusion” or any of its spinoffs are going to be with us for a long, long time.
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All image captions, pull quotes, appendices, etc. by the editors not the authors.