Pilgrim Soul: Confessions of an Unrepentant Cosmopolitan: revolution

Friday, July 5, 2013

Zombies on the march

So here are your zombies: an unstoppable human wave, climbing walls, sweeping over firing soldiers, overturning cars, smashing everything in its path. Blind, deaf, pitiless, faceless - and all powerful.

Saint Petersburg 1917. Paris 1968. Cairo 2013.

And Brad Pitt saving his sniveling family from the horror of the masses and presumably bringing it back to the suburban paradise, complete with pancake breakfasts and picket fences.

"World War Z" is a bad movie: not just because it is incoherent but because it is false in its message. It is telling its viewers that the huge crowds and flash mobs they are seeing daily on their screens can be contained by individual heroism and stockpiling of guns: a Tea Party ideology in the age of global movements. Max Brooks' "World War Z" tried to revive the spirit of communal action by looking back to World War 2. The form of the book, with its many individual voices telling a common story, is a pastiche of Stud Terkel's "The Good War". It may be preposterous in its premise and naive in its depiction of individual countries' politics (Israel's going to bring all the Palestinians into its shelter? Really?) but it is responding to the real challenges of globalism. "World War Z" the movie is hiding its head in the sand and hoping the revolution will pass it by.

The zombie, like all pop-culture monsters, is a metaphor for our fears. Like all such monsters, it is polysemic. It may represent the fear of the body, the fear of death, even, as I argued in my recent article, the fear of language.
http://www.tijdschriftframe.nl/portfolio/item/frame-26-1-apocalypse-in-contemporary-culture/

But the movie is quite clear in what fears in invokes. The opening (and visually most impressive) shots are of huge crowds, multitudes, people-choked giant cities. Small-town America looking at the world and seeing zombies on the march. And small-town America is right: the zombies are coming. I, for one, hope they'll get here soon.

Friday, November 4, 2011

A Stitch in Time....a shroud for capitalism

Just saw the new movie "In Time" (dir. Andrew Nicoll) and my belief that a new era of revolutions and social upheavals is just around the corner has been strengthened. If Justin Timberlake is a revolutionary, then we all are!

The movie is based on a clever literalization of "Time is money". In the future society, time IS money. You stop aging after your 25th birthday (great!) but you die if you don't make enough time (not so great). Btw, what about overdraft?

The movie is peppered with statements like "Can you steal (time) from the rich if it's already stolen from the poor?", the time-owners are heartless and arrogant bloodsuckers, and the Robin Hood exploits of the protagonist Will Salas and his Patricia Hearst-like girlfriend are represented as heroid. There are some heart-tugging moments like the scene where Will's mother dies running to her son, desperate for just one more minute.

The movie is deliberately shot in a somber, black-and-white, 1930s style. The run-down industrial estates, the glittering skyscrapers, even the flapper-like fashion, all evoke the aesthetics - and mood - of the Depression

Pop culture is the dreams of society. Judging by this particular nightmare, OWS has way to go!

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Rise of the Planet of the Apes - Primates of the World, Unite!

just saw "Rise of Planet of the Apes": a prequel to the 2001 remake of the Hollywood 70s franchise based on the 1963 French novel by Pierre Boulle. Considering the attitudes to France in the US (one Christian nutcase recently declared the Statue of Liberty to be an evil idol smuggled into the country by the French Freemasons), the authors (of the remake (Rupert Wyatt dir.) wisely decided not to acknowledge the initial inspiration. Too bad because the novel is hilarious and highly recommended. It has the most unusual love triangle you're likely to encounter in literature (hint: think of a Frenchman torn between a stunning beauty with the mind of a monkey and a wise and compassionate lady with the body...you guess it!) No such risque situations in Hollywood, of course, where mindlessness is hardly exceptional. However, even though I went to the movie ready to curse, like Balaam I've been forced to bless. It is actually quite a good movie and moreover, I see it as an interesting cultural symptom.

The plot hinges on the discovery of a cure for Alzheimer's which has the unintended consequence of raising the intelligence of the primates on whom it is tested. It also eventually unleashes a wold-wide plague. So the movie handily taps into two great cultural anxieties: the aging baby boomers confronted with their own mortality and cuts to Medicare versus the young generation who feel unfairly saddled with caring for their elders and probably would not mind a plague or two in the old-age facilities. So far so good; but suddenly the movie abandons geriatric angst and moves on to depicting the mistreatment of the lab primates, which is quite heartbreaking. And when Caesar the genius ape rebels, teaches his fellow chimps, gorillas and orangs to speak, wield weapons and crash cars, and leads them to the promised land in the redwoods, I at least was ready to cheer.

Call it far-fetched but I could not stop thinking about the current worldwide unrest: the Arab spring, the disturbances in London, demonstrations in Israel...Perhaps the new age of revolution is upon us. So let it come. I can only hope that when the downtrodden rise up, they will be as restrained and humane as Caesar the ape.

And finally a personal note: all the movie catastrophes happen in NYC and LA, so I was very pleased to have this particular apocalypse strike my beloved city of San Francisco. The movie has some great shots of the Golden Gate Bridge and Muir Woods.