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 film. 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!

Hey Jude Times Square Subway Station from 39forks on Vimeo.

Saw this at BoingBoing and was heartened by this spontaneous singing of “Hey Jude” at the Times Square subway station. It’s just a small reminder that that not all things in life have a price tag. Then again, I can imagine industry lawyers demanding a take down on the video for copyright infringement. What a weird world we live in!

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.

P. 1

Pt. 2

Erik Assadourian from the World Watch Institute introduces the 2010 edition of the State of the World (you can download some chapters for free here, or purchase PDF of the whole book for less than $10). The presentation style may not zing like TED, but I think it’s worth cribbing some notes, especially the intro which makes a clear argument for the importance of transforming culture. The book has several chapters on media, including a very good one by Jonah Sachs and Susan Finkelpearl (of Free Range Studios–makers of Story of Stuff) about social marketing:

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(click on the book cover to download the article)

More on the video link

Unexpectedly the Avatar story is cloning itself onto real life situations. More accurately, it was life on Earth that inspired the imaginary action on Pandora, so not surprisingly many are drawing upon this new planetary myth to make their plight– ironically– more real.

For example, in the above video, clever Palestinian activists done Na’vi outfits to translate their cause’ imagery into a new symbolic order. By recontextualizing their cause through a new set of signs, the reality frames of the past can be challenged by the Avatar meme. Paradoxically, by identifying themselves as indigenous, these Palestinian youth are also connecting themselves with global pop culture, a hybridized strategy that can jujitsu around the political controls normally exercised in the mainstream news media.

(Previously a similar effort was done when these same activists parodied an Israeli cell phone company ad.)

Likewise, an indigenous group in India, the Dongria Kondh, are fighting the mining operation of Vedanta Resources. The whole thing more closely parallels Avatar, which has not escaped the attention of Survival International, an NGO that helps endangered tribal groups. They sent an appeal to James Cameron for support, and have released the following video that describes the plight of the Dongria Kondh.

(For more background information on the Dongria Kondh and how to support their struggle, follow this link.)

Expect to see more blue people appearing on Earth in the very near future.

“Cyclonic perpetual emotion machine…” and other prescient observations about Fox from Jon Stewart. Not surprisingly, Stewart eviscerates his nemesis on ‘The O’Reilly Factor.’ But of greater interest is his discussion of TV and radio from a media ecology view (around the 13:00 mark).

Case study number one is the “Green Police” ads by Audio, which couches its anti-PC message in ironic humor, thereby softening the seriousness of its subtext. It confirms the fears that environmental regulation will result in a police state, and turns anyone who cares about the environment into a potential fascist. While we may laugh at such cartoony fears (it’s only a joke, right?), the Rush Limbaugh crowd takes them very seriously.

(It’s not an illegitimate protest. From an eco-justice point of view, the threat of global regulations forced upon local populations is real, but in the latter case the concern is that corporate interests will hijack environmental rhetoric in the service of obliterating local autonomy in the same way that trade liberalization promoted by the WTO has done.)

Here Audi defends the rich white male’s perceived loss of autonomy and his right to be a jerk. My particular peeve against Audi is based on personal experience in Europe where Audi drivers across the board are the most arrogant and dangerous exemplars of the tragedy of commons (for example, watch this ad). On highways one must be in constant alert of Audis rushing at jet fighter speed, lest your leisurely Sunday afternoon drive through the Tuscan countryside ends in a pile of crushed steel, bones and shattered glass.

The paranoia exhibited by Audi plays into the general meme that government regulation of corporate abuses will translate into socialist totalitarianism. Say “Green Police” ten times fast and you may end up with “Greenpeace.”

Call this a backlash shot across the bough of environmental activism. Green consciousness becomes the work of thought police.

You can see more “Green Police” ads and PSAs here.

Case study number two comes from Bud Lite, which (yawn) sticks to its failsafe storyline. In it Bud Lite’s primary target audience (those possessed by an inner 13-year-old “mook“) must retreat to their boys-only (stripper exception clause allowed) playhouse to take cover from moralistic authorities (women) who condemn their innocent behavior. But now the right to secrecy, addiction and misogyny is threatened by ecological activism. In this ad, rather than a house being built of recycled beer cans (which excites a young female foil), its owners have constructed a living refrigerator, without realizing, however, that symbolically it’s also a morgue.

Case Study number three is the Budweiser bridge. The only thing surprising about this ad is how it blatantly demeans humans as mere slaves to their corporate overlord. In this case, people are willing to let the truck (a symbolic container of the Budweiser corporate brand) drive over their backs. So while the previous ads play into people’s fears of losing individual freedom to ethical constraints, here people voluntarily become the servomechanism of corporate power and control. How’s that for ironic Super Bowl humor!

Bonus footage: Go here to see a hilarious Daily Show deconstruction of Super Bowl ads from 2004.

The pith* theory of advertising.

* Pithing is when you stick a needle in the brain of a live frog. The goal is to scramble its brain in order to immobilize it for dissection while it is still alive. When applied to advertising a paradox or insult is used like a needle to confuse and conquer unwilling media gawkers into immobile rage. In protest I won’t post a link.