The Commodity Fetish
Capitalism has not died as the theorists predicted, but its saturation into every facet of society would shock and appall even the most casual Marxist. If Baudrillard was right and consumption has become the basis of society rather than production, commodity fetishism has seeped into individual selfhood itself. Not only can people be commodified but, aided by the ubiquities of the Information Age, so can experience. Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience explores this new relationship between the quantifiable dollar and human ontology. Real-life porn star Sasha Grey plays an escort whose clients don’t just pay for sex, but the simulacrum of intimacy. Baudrillard seems like an obvious influence here, writing about the supersession of signs in a late capitalist society and the value relationship of communication. Grey provides the illusion of intimacy, listening to yuppies bark about Obama and the economy and the banalities of their self-validated opinions, a gynoid who validates her customers not simply by servicing their bodies, but by cultivating their self-esteems. Grey’s ersatz boyfriend is a personal trainer, fulfilling the same role by helping said yuppies hone their body image; their time, if not their lives, entail quantifying aspects of the human experience. The film is set a day before the 2008 election – Grey’s clients are galvanized by political punditry and the ensuing economic crisis. They rail Grey with financial advice, apparently unaware that the very wealth which has empowered their material lives has transformed the traits they might’ve considered sacrosanct (love, empathy) into the purchaseable.
Soderbergh is a bit of a dilettante: his films weave easily between personal auteurism and market blockbuster in a way that suggest he doesn’t care much about his integrity, but The Girlfriend Experience is a strong effort, gesturing as it does to theoretical history and current events. He shoots the film excellently – distant, austere compositions and decidedly Modernitist interiors. The Red Desert and Cries and Whispers are cited influences, but the film is so narratively close to Hal Ashby’s Shampoo that it’s almost a remake. What Ashby asked about the 1960s: “Do the financial and material supercede our innate need for personal fulfillment?” Soderbergh asks of our nascent century. Horrifyingly, both films answer: “Yes.”
“Hot check for my haircut” would be a great album title.
John: Ha, just sat down. How goes it?
me: not too terrible
counting the seconds until my loan money comes in. i’m about to write a hot check for my haircut!
Eins, Zwei, Die
Undead Nazi-monsters! But otherwise meh.
“Dead Snow certainly earns points for enthusiasm; the last act finds Wirkola doing almost nothing save trying to out-gore the previous scene, as blood rockets from chainsaw wounds and intestines are uncoiled like fleshy ropes. The nastiest moment in the film is, however, a borderline coprophagous sex scene. Wirkola shares Peter Jackson’s perverse joy in presenting the most lurid visuals imaginable and then rubbing the audience’s face in them. The film is as fun as it is asinine, it’s just a shame that Wirkola had nothing new to add to the equation. Homages are always welcome, but Dead Snow’s existence is nothing more than an excuse to pile as many together as possible, nostalgic retrieval without inherent motivation. Now that Wirkola has aired out his resume, it’s time for him to start honing his own ideas rather than endlessly rehashing the past with no intention of moving on.”
I also got to use the word “coprophagous,” for what I hope will be the last time.
A new show, and a pretty damn good one. Don’t stop, git it git it. I promise for the next show I won’t make out with the mic so hard.
I’m going to try to put up a bevy of new reviews this week. I’ve been watching plenty of films, but haven’t coralled my thoughts enough to write about them all.
A Dish Best Served Capitalist
The latest over at the jibby-’jibe:
“The title of Götz Spielmann’s film, Revanche, can be construed simply as a synonym for revenge, which is certainly a facile motivation for this dark neo-noir, but doing so misses an important political dimension in the word. Revanchism also refers to a political strategy, by a nation or ethnic bloc, to regain something lost, of pride or territory. The characters in Revanche exhibit an ethereal sense of lacking, less tangible than the title’s political connotations; theirs is a spiritual malaise created by the modern world, the specifics of which are less important than the fact of their inescapability.”
Also, I couldn’t help but wrest some Marxist metaphors from this movie. You can’t be a grad student who crawls into bed with Macherey and Althusser without getting jiggy with culture industry. I fully expect to disappear (further) into my own colon in the near future. Deal with it.
Oh, hey. Podcasts have been down for like a skillion years, but we’ve still been doing some good shows.
Here’s last week’s, wherein I request the score of Waltz with Bashir, by one of my favorite modern classical composers, Max Richter, and then yak about Drag Me to Hell. This week we talked about The Hangover, which I thought sucked a tumescent willy. Look for that at some point…
Edit: Here’s some point.
Casting the Runes
Like, I imagine, a great deal of this past weekend’s theatergoers, I enjoyed Sam Raimi’s return to slapstick-splatter in Drag Me to Hell. I’m not a Raimi fanboy, but I’ve shared much of the disappointment that’s accompanied his 1990s shift to larger affairs. It wasn’t just the aesthetic move from basement-vid horror to CGI blitz, it was that the Evil Dead series was, well, more interesting than anything he’s done since. No one had seen anything like it – marrying Lucio Fulci with Buster Keaton?
DMtH isn’t just a return to form for Raimi, whose Ghost House production company has also been failing to live up to its potential, but a nice shot in the arm for a horror genre grown diseased by the ultra-seriousness of J-Horror, torture-porn, and remakes of both. People forget that this shit can be fun.
One thing I really noticed (and enjoyed) about the film was its narrative proximity to Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon. I count Tourneur as probably my favorite horror director who created some of the best films of the RKO Radio/Val Lewton Era; a bevy of great, low-budget chillers including The Leopard Man, Cat People, and I Walked with a Zombie. Watch ‘em.
IMDb synopsis: “Dr. John Holden ventures to London to attend a paranormal psychology symposium with the intention to expose devil cult leader, Julian Karswell. Holden is a skeptic and does not believe in Karswell’s power. Nonetheless, he accepts an invitation to stay at Karswell’s estate, along with Joanna Harrington, niece of Holden’s confidant who was electrocuted in a bizarre automobile accident. Karswell secretly slips a parchment into Holden’s papers that might possibly be a death curse. Recurring strange events finally strike fear into Holden, who believes that his only hope is to pass the parchment back to Karswell to break the demonic curse.”
Sounds familiar, ne?
