The Glow is Gone

Last week Avatar became the highest-grossing film of all time, surpassing Cameron’s last megalithic venture, a film which marked his departure from nuclear critique science fiction to techno-futurist capitulation. Less interesting to me than his lauded visual and technological prowess is his attention to multiple aspect ratios and marketing strategies, which focused on a plurality of theatrical presentations (IMAX, 3D, etc.) that account for the disproportionate audience-to-income rates. Producers will be paying attention to that.

The movie itself? Much foofaraw has been made about the narrative’s white guilt parable and apparent ecological plea. Beyond Cameron’s more cringe-inducing attempts at subtext (Jake Sully, fucking Unobtainium) lies a rather more disturbing parallel:

July 2005 and August 2006 witnessed the creation by the United States Army of several counterinsurgency programs, namely the “Human Terrain System.” The program, now lauded heavily by the Obama administration, is responsible for embedding anthropologists within military units (predominantly in Afghanistan and Iraq, though there are plans for expansion into Africa), ostensibly to provide military operations with palliative intel and to ease the respective cultures toward its invaders. Proponents have the easy job of explaining that HTS creates relationships that help reduce cultural misunderstanding that lead to violent conflict; what isn’t always necessarily addressed is how the very social sciences are being weaponized into hegemonic oppression.

A space marine pretends to be a blue ThunderCat in order to influence and colonize their culture on behalf of human (white, American) industrial interests. He succeeds, but decides to lead them in a violent rebellion against the oppressive technological forces of humanity, but white hegemonic ideology is ultimately triumphant as it overcomes and outperforms this non-white tribal melange at its own game. Colonialism and paternalism have made this story appealing since Edgar Rice Burroughs. The nightmare of hegemony is that it turns domination into an abstraction, even a moral one that doesn’t necessarily align with its exterior dialogue. Thus an ecological plea and fantasy about the joys of tribalism becomes something more sinister; the Na’vi consent to their new white savior because, as Laclau and Mouffe described in Hegemony and Social Strategy, it is the goal of hegemony to dictate to another class that, above all, it is to be subservient.

The resurgence in Romanian cinema has followed a steadfast tract of nightmare-nostalgia with the Stalinist Ceausescu regime. Every glance seems to be backward, a troubled, furtive peek to see if anyone is following you. As a police officer shadows his young target, suspected of a casual pot habit, continuity with a police-state past and a dangerous habit of watching become more than a little pronounced. Interpellation is still a paramount concern among the post-Soviet bloc: the target subject exists only insofar as he is acknowledged by the (perhaps unwitting) ideological apparatus, on a charge the cop thinks is bullshit. Like in previous Romanian films 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days and The Death of  Mr. Lazarescu, we as viewers feel as furtive observers of the transgressive. Bureaucracy in these films functions as exactly the opposite of popular American cinema and TV serials such as “CSI,” where logical systems and methodologies are propped up and hailed – behold the power of our ratiocination. In Romania this kind of logic is a cause for mourning, even after the oppressive state has been removed.

If you accept that we live in times of hyperreality, where metanarratives are no longer plausible, where the self has destabilized into nonexistence, where the sign has become overloaded by late capitalism, then the concept of Surrogates would seem to have a more impressive prescience. Taking postmodernism to its cybernetic extreme has been in fashion since Ghost in the Shell (Surrogates openly plagiarizes much of the original anime, as well as The Matrix) if not during the Gibson/Sterling cyberpunk clique.

This was a weakly wrought film, too content to openly crib its ideas and imagery from extant Sci-Fi canon (even bad ones like A.I. and I, Robot) to create an ingenuous world. The film never really understands its own moralizing to form a real human critique; lifelike dolls are our sensuous stand-ins while crippled, unkempt “operators” live like shut-ins, an all-too-proximal reflection of internet culture. But so what? Despite the film’s insistence on the lack of genuineness in this kind of culture, it never really comes to grips with what that genuineness might be, or why we should prefer it to simulacra. The film also never really explains what the hell is up with the group of luddite extremists (are they religious?) who categorically reject this robotic surrogacy in order to live “naturally” in slums – this is meant to represent the extreme counterpoint on the moral spectrum and one which, I’m guessing, is viewed as equally wrong.

The weakest science fiction takes ideas which are topical (or is it? people have been discussing simulacra and cybernetics for over 30 years) and construes them onto fashionable chic (remember Hackers?) when neither the aesthetic or the moral imperative of the story are worth salt on their own.

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.”

Nikita Mikhalkov’s new film, released in 2007 somehow just made it to Fayetteville. Click for the less-than-great writeup. It was a decent film with some nice compositions, though the reliance on sentimentality became a bit problematic by the end. I’m just psyched the film found its way belatedly to the local AMC Select (for about four days). Mikhalkov, who also directed Burnt by the Sun appears to have a fairly optimistic view of Russia’s post-Soviet malaise. Critics who thought Burnt offered conciliatory gestures as some kind of Western pandering will probably see the same at work in 12; he is, after all, transcribing a Western cinematic text for Russian exigencies, even as he lampoons capitalist gangsterism.  One of my favorite history courses in grad school was on Soviet historiography, the gist being that the Russian narrative is situated in some kind of liminal space between Western Modernity and the older modes of the Far East. Stephen Kotkin called it something like “Russia’s mirror of Modernity,” implying a relationship with forces we consider historical both causal and distinct from that of the West. For practical purposes, just read Andrew Meier’s Black Earth or Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Imperium for the outsiders’ perspective.  I wish Mikhalkov could delve a little deeper into his nation’s mythos, past and present, the way Sokurov has done, but I suppose its a tall order.