LENIN'S TOMB

Sunday, August 08, 2010

Chattel story posted by Richard Seymour

People say the most unlikely things about films. They say Toy Story 3 is a miraculous film. They say it's a marxist parable about exploitation and authority. Or a treatise on Stalinism, or the Nazi holocaust. Neither Walt Disney nor its Pixar subsidiary will comment to make it clear which of the various interpretations is accurate. John Lasseter, whose long apprenticeship as a writer in the CGI end of the business has culminated in the Toy Story franchise, won't speak up either. This is poor customer service. Someone, somewhere, has to break the silence and let us the consumers know what the commodity does, forchristsake. Well, here's a thought.

Toy Story 3 is a story of how freedom is achieved through commodification, and how "the consent of the governed" roughly equals the willing embrace of bondage. You only have to bear in mind that the main characters are themselves commodities. It's a jocular, mocking, morality story about toys, their particular role in pedagogy and socialisation, the pseudo-history and televisual cliches they condense. Toys are a micro-cosm of the adult universe, produced so that the child doesn't have to invent the mainsprings of her future life, but can instead go about constructing her ego-ideal around these always-already present objects. They come laden with meanings which naturalise the myths of adult life, meanings that the franchise knowingly smirks about but doesn't really explore or problematise. They allow for the minimum of creative input and construction from the child.

In the franchise, the toys inexplicably have personalities, aspirations and purposiveness remarkably like those of their human masters. In fact, in the CGI universe, their level of reality is no different from that of their owners (who are, in their different ways, also commodities). But their ultimate fulfilment is in being owned, being put to work, "being there for" Andy. That this "being there for" involves being totally placid, pliable, silent and impersonal does not detract from their, er, humanity. That is the required performance. Everyone, and everything, has its place in the Toy Story scheme of things. That scheme is a hierarchy of commodities with toys near the bottom, subordinate and devoted to their owners. And ultimately, their devotion is reciprocated as, when the time comes for Andy to go to college, he emotes more about parting with his toys than he does about parting with his relatives.

Any attempt to break free of such mastery is illusory, merely a search for another master who will be even more tyrannical. When, after years of neglecting them, Andy appears to leave most of his toys out for garbage collection before heading off to college, the toys respond by sneaking into another box of toys destined for donation to the Sunnyside Day Centre. They refuse to heed Woody's pleas that Andy didn't mean for them to be sent to the incinerator, and instead revel in what appears to be a toy utopia, "without owners". But utopia is soon revealed as a totalitarian nightmare run by an embittered big boss toy named Lotso. The toys are forced to stay in a room where they are smashed up by crazy, dysfunctional kids who don't know how to play with toys. Buzz Lightyear, brainwashed (re-programmed to factory settings) by Lotso and his henchmen, is chosen to guard the prisoners. (Worth saying, this is the first scene in which any black characters appear at all. It is also the scene where the usual Toy Story ritual of sado-comical limb amputating, beheading and eye-gouging is repeated with maximum gusto.)

When the toys orchestrate the standard great escape from the prison camp, it is foiled by Lotso and his henchmen. There follows a cliched scene wherein the bad guy tries to break the defiance of the good guys with a demoralising patter about how the world works, and how they'd best try to fit in. Among the toys, Barbie suddenly erupts with the indignant cri de coeur: "Government should be based on the consent of the governed, not the threat of force!" It is immediately ironised, because such earnest expostulations don't really fit in with the tone of the film. But the writers will certainly have been aware of the long tradition of Disney films regurgitating tropes from liberal political theory, albeit slightly more subtly than this. Not only that, but they will be aware that the first CGI Barbie movie, adapted from the Nutcracker, was based around precisely this struggle between liberalism and tyranny. (I watched it with my nieces one day.) This is merely one example of the constant self-referential ironizing that regurgitates these tropes in a knowing way without really problematising them. And of course, the "consent of the governed" that is referred to here is the commodity's enjoyment in bondage, her revelling in being used and owned by a master, her sense of freedom in such subjection.

The story is thus an ironic, potted re-telling of American mythologies, as related by commodites, especially through the medium of television. Woody and Buzz Lightyear, the main characters, are traditional models of upright American masculinity, Woody a fifties prototype of the overland frontiersman, Buzz Lightyear a sixties prototype of the space frontiersman. The female characters exist principally as helpmeets and romantic encounters for the toy boys, highlighting their natural heteronormativity, confirming their dominant status, reinforcing a gendered dichotomy that, as everyone knows, real toys themselves do a great deal to produce. The toys exist as a community of sorts, a community of heroes, living the strenuous life, their shared pain and sacrifice bonding them together, the mortal peril elevating them to new planes of existence - all of this struggle so that they can continue to be the willing bonded serfs of rich, white yanqui scum. The narrative confirms that commodities are the most important things in life, real friends, closer friends than anyone you'll ever meet, and that to be a commodity is the most rewarding mode of existence. The latter claim is hardly unique to Hollywood films, but in drawing out and embracing the servitude implicit in commodification Toy Story takes it a step farther than others.

The extravagant praise for the Toy Story franchise therefore demands some sort of explanation. It is a crashingly dull series, manipulative and predatory toward child consumers, tedious in its little nudge-nudge gestures to adult consumers, punctuated with aesthetic cliches that don't really qualify as ironic (oh the weather's taken a bad turn, so there must be trouble afoot), etc. I suppose the terms "feel good" and "life-affirming" must apply here. The films leave a warm little glow in the heart, reminding you that your alienated, commodified relationships are perfectly normal, human, desirable and moreover actually protected as human rights in the advanced capitalist states - it's in the constitution, dammit. There's also, though, a calculated element of Rorschach, wherein elements and motifs from history and ideology are scavenged and re-deployed, so that you can retrospectively read into the movie - whose effects you have just involuntarily responded to at a basic physical level - whatever rationalisation for so responding that makes you good with it. Indeed, there is marxism in the film, and the American revolution, and Stalinism, and the Nazi holocaust, and freedom, and sacrifice, and family values, and so on... because the film proves that all such aspects of experience are susceptible to being broken up and rearticulated in the commodity form. It is capital's highest tribute to itself, to its mode of production, distribution and exchange, its ability to convert all materials into some exchangeable, fungible base. In the furnace of capitalist culture, all of human existence is silly putty or play doh, malleable, protean, and saleable. That too is the basic message of the Toy Story franchise.

Labels: capitalism, commodities, culture industry, hollywood, movies, spectacle

Saturday, November 15, 2008

CIA Aesthetics posted by Richard Seymour

It isn't all Jackson Pollock and Encounter, you know:

Not until 1996 did the CIA announce, with little fanfare, that it had established an Entertainment Liaison Office, which would collaborate in a strictly advisory capacity with film-makers. Heading up the office was Chase Brandon, who had served for 25 years in the agency's elite clandestine services division, as an undercover operations officer. A PR man he isn't, though he does have Hollywood connections: he's a cousin of Tommy Lee Jones.

But the past 12 years of semi-acknowledged collaboration were preceded by decades in which the CIA maintained a deep-rooted but invisible influence of Hollywood. How could it be otherwise? As the former CIA man Bob Baer - whose books on his time with the agency were the basis for Syriana - told us: "All these people that run studios - they go to Washington, they hang around with senators, they hang around with CIA directors, and everybody's on board."

There is documentary evidence for his claims. Luigi Luraschi was the head of foreign and domestic censorship for Paramount in the early 1950s. And, it was recently discovered, he was also working for the CIA, sending in reports about how film censorship was being employed to boost the image of the US in movies that would be seen abroad. Luraschi's reports also revealed that he had persuaded several film-makers to plant "negroes" who were "well-dressed" in their movies, to counter Soviet propaganda about poor race relations in the States. The Soviet version was rather nearer the truth.

Luraschi's activities were merely the tip of the iceberg. Graham Greene, for example, disowned the 1958 adapatation of his Vietnam-set novel The Quiet American, describing it as a "propaganda film for America". In the title role, Audie Murphy played not Greene's dangerously ambiguous figure - whose belief in the justice of American foreign policy allows him to ignore the appalling consequences of his actions - but a simple hero. The cynical British journalist, played by Michael Redgrave, is instead the man whose moral compass has gone awry. Greene's American had been based in part on the legendary CIA operative in Vietnam, Colonel Edward Lansdale. How apt, then, that it should have been Lansdale who persuaded director Joseph Mankewiecz to change the script to suit his own ends.

The CIA didn't just offer guidance to film-makers, however. It even offered money. In 1950, the agency bought the rights to George Orwell's Animal Farm, and then funded the 1954 British animated version of the film. Its involvement had long been rumoured, but only in the past decade have those rumours been substantiated, and the tale of the CIA's role told in Daniel Leab's book Orwell Subverted.

The most common way for the CIA to exert influence in Hollywood nowadays is not through anything as direct as funding, or rewriting scripts, but offering to help with matters of verisimilitude. That is done by having serving or former CIA agents acting as advisers on the film, though some might wonder whether there is ever really such a thing a "former agent". As ex-CIA agent Lindsay Moran, the author of Blowing My Cover, has noted, the CIA often calls on former officers to perform tasks for their old employer.

Labels: cia, hollywood, movies, propaganda

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Filmkritik posted by Richard Seymour

"The second wave of American films about the war came in the early 1980s. Most notably First Blood (1982) Uncommon Valor (1983) and Missing in Action (1984) looked and sounded completely different from the films of the first wave. In terms of content, these new treatments, focusing entirely upon the plight of American veterans in the United States and those supposedly still being held by Hanoi, were unapologetic in their revisionism. For one thing, they took the POW/MIA myth as fact, with American viewers even returning to Southeast Aasia to rescue POWs in the case of Uncommon Valor and Missing in Action (each spawning sequels). By such means, America learned that its Vietnam veterans not only hated the evil Asians who were still holding their buddies hostage, but abhorred their own government, which continued to deny - and even cover up - the very fact that those buddies were prisoner.

"One irony of the principle POW films is that they made a part of the argument that I am making: specifically, that the war with Vietnam was still going on ... after 1975, through the 1980s, and well into the 1990s at least. Unfortunately they, along with the entire POW/MIA industry, inverted the roles of victim and aggressor, choosing to represent Americans as being held hostage by the Vietnamese, never mind acknowledging the ongoing war against Vietnam. Meanwhile, release of the films coincided with several paramilitary operations in Southeast Asia undertaken by the Reagan administration. Segments of Hollywood joined the cause. As Bruce Franklin revealed in Mythmaking in America, in a strange alliance Colonel James 'Bo' Gritz (an Army Special Forces veteran and a firm believer in the POW cause), William Shatner, and Clint Eastwood put together a 1982 cover rescue mission into Laos - with the full knowledge of the president, who reportedly told Eastwood that, if the team found on POW, he would "start World War Three" to get the rest out.

"The mission, as well as other efforts supposedly directed by Gritz, turned up no evidence of surviving American POWs. The task of suggesting that there was such evidence was left to, and picked up by, Hollywood. In Uncommon Valor (1983) and Missing in Action (1984), teams led by Gene Hackman and Chuck Norris, respectively, turn up dozens of POWs still being held in Southeast Asia. Although Uncommon Valor was more commercially successful, Missing in Action was more influential in the genre, helping to pave the way for its own sequels and other related films. Central to the plot of Missing in Action and the films that would follow it was the complete inversion of victimization. American war crimes are unmentioned or exonerated while the Vietnamese are depicted as barbarous criminals. Franklin sums up the strategy of historical inversion in M.I.A: 'Just as the POW issue was consciously created in 1969 amid shocking revelations about US conduct ... Missing in Action uses the POW issue to indoctrinate the audiences of the 1980s with the notion that Americans were not the victimisers but the victims. Those who have forgotten, or are too young to remember, learn that all accusations of US war crimes are merely insidious Asian Communist propaganda designed to hide the crimes the Vietnamese are still perpetrating against innocent Americans.' ...

"None of these earlier films, though, had anything like the impact of 1985's Rambo: First Blood Part II.

"Timed to coincide with the ten-year anniversary of the end of the war, the pre-release press kit for the film contained a video treating the POW/MIA issue and hyping Rambo's connection to the myth of surviving prisoners being held by Hanoi. A sequel to 1982's First Blood, a surprising box office success, Rambo revolves around the character of John Rambo, a misunderstood and tortured American veteran of the war in Vietnam. The script for First Blood had circulated for years in Hollywood, undergoing numerous plot changes and tentative casting. In the body of rising superstar Sylvester Stallone, however, the character became a veritable superhero in the 1980s, a cultural phenomenon that would reshape the ways in which Americans ld and discussed stories about the war in Vietnam.

"The opening shot of Rambo reveals the prison labour camp in which Rambo (Stallone) has spent the last several years since single-handedl destroying the town of Hope, Oregon, in First Blood. Rambo's former commander, Colonel Trautman, arrives at the prison, requesting that Rambo accompany him on a new mission: 'Recon for POWs in 'Nam.' After hearing the details of the mission and agreeing to join Trautman, Rambo asks the question for which the film became infamous. 'Sir, do we get to win this time?' 'This time it's up to you', Trautman replies. Unfortunately for Rambo, Trautman is not in charge of this mission. Marshall Murdoch, a Washington bureaucrat working for a congressional committee, is leading the team, along with a group of mercenaries. The committee, Murdoch explains to Rambo, is simply attempting to find evidence that will disprove any beliefs that POWs are still being held by the Vietnamese. Rambo is only supposed to take photographs of the empty camp, the very one in which he was held during the war. 'Under no circumstances,' he is informed by Murdoch, 'are you to engage the enemy.'

"After being dropped in Vietnam from the base in Thailand, Rambo meets up with Co Bao (played by the Hawaiian actress Julia Nickson), his Vietnamese guide, who speaks in short, choppy English. As they move down the river toward the camp, escorted by pirates, Rambo tells Bao his story - how, when he returned from Vietnam, he found another war going in the United States, a 'quiet war' against the veterans. Bao relates that she is working against her own government because her father, an 'intelligence officer', had been killed. When the mission is over, she tells Rambo, she would very much like to go to America. When they arrive at the camp, Rambo defies his orders and, with Bao's help, infiltrates the camp, which is of course populated with a dozen American POWs. He easily kills and outmaneuvers several Vietnamese guards, all of whom appear even less Vietnamese than Bao. Rambo rescues one POW and brings him along to the extraction point where he is to be picked up by Murdoch's men. Along the way, as they elude the inept Vietnamese soldiers, the POW tells Rambo how timely his rescue was: 'They move us around a lot - to harvest crops'. Thus the film's first explanation for why the Vietnamese would still be holding American soldiers: during a devastating famine and with an ongoing war with Cambodia, the Vietnamese need some help with their agricultural production ...

"Rambo, however, is much less concerned with the Vietnamese, or even the Soviets, as an enemy than it is with the United States government. Rambo's mission was never intended to prove the existence of POWs. The government, which the film ultimately shows to be more evil and corrupt than either the Russians or the Vietnamese, had no intention of rescuing any POWs found by Rambo. This is consistent with both the tone and content of the POW/MIA myth, whose adherents strongly believed in a government-led cover-up of evidence confirming the existence of remaining POWs. It is also consistent with domestic Reaganism in general, which blamed government for the troubles of the country. Trautman, angry at Murdoch for abandoning his man, tells him that he knows what the cover-up is reall about: 'Money. In '72, we were supposed to pay the Cong four and a half billion dollars in war reparations. We reneged. They kept the POWs.' Murdoch doesn't dispute this story; he in fact admits that the POWs are being held as ransom. But the alternatives to a cover-up are either 'paying blackmail money' that would end up 'financing the war against our [Cambodian] allies,' or, worse, 'starting the war up all over again' to save 'a few forgotten ghosts'.

"Back at the POW camp, Rambo escapes with the help of Co Bao, who returns disguised as a prositute servicing the Vietnamese guards. After their escape, Bao and Rambo share a romantic encounter, during which he agress to take her with him back to the United States. After the kiss, however, Bao is gunned down by a Vietnamese soldier, which sets off Rambo on a killing rampage, leading him back to the camp to rescue the remaining POWs rather than escape alone. During this sequence, Rambo becomes a one-man death squad, destroying helicopters and entire villages, and sending all the Vietnamese into a frenzied panic and, eventually, to their deaths. After a final face-off with the Russians, Rambo takes a helicopter and returns to the base in Thailand, ready to confront his betrayers. Removing the large mounted gun from the helicopter, Rambo completely destroys the huge supercomputers lauded by Murdoch at the beginning of the film. He then goes after Murdoch, stabbing his knife into a desk right next to Murdoch's head, but allowing him to live. 'You know there's more men out there,' he tells Murdoch. 'Find them. Or I'll find you.' As Rambo is one his way out of the camp, Trautman implores him to stay rather than wandering off. 'The war, everything that happened here, may be wrong. But, dammit, don't hate your country for it,' he tells him. 'Hate?' Rambo responds. 'I'd die for it.' Rambo also goes on to offer a final statement on behalf of his men. 'I want what they want, what every guy who came over here and spilled his guyts and gave everything they had wants: for our country to love us as much as we love it.'"

Edwin A Martini, Invisible Enemies: The American War on Vietnam 1975-2000, University of Massacheusetts Press, 2007

Labels: hollywood, imperial ideology, rambo, vietnam

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Disastertainment: the sequel. posted by Richard Seymour

As if to take the piss completely, this piece of shit slithers down the sewer (you can watch the trailer here). A big storm comes down the North Sea, and - to apocalyptic chorals ripped off from Orff - brings a vengeful mob of truculent waves down the Thames, tearing the barrier to shreds and causing alarm in Whitehall. Landmarks are drenched. Desperate phone calls are made ("get out of London, now!"). The deputy prime minister peers over his glasses while his COBRA team flounder, and ask stupid questions like "are you saying the worst is yet to come?" They evacuate the city, but all too late. Martial law is the settled way to accomplish this, of course. The hero, in a way, is a whacky scientician who has some crazy theories that turn out to be correct. This is a common theme in 'environmental' disaster movies: not that a scientific consensus with overwhelming evidence is conscientiously obscured, rebuffed and ignored. Not that there are any 'interests' involved in destroying the planet (yeah right, what are you, a conspiracy nut?). But that one salutary genius with oddball problems of his own and estranged relations has the answer, and a bungling political leadership refuses to act until it's too late due to some obscure complacency. Still, it's as well they don't act too soon, otherwise we wouldn't get to see all that cool water submerge the houses and landmarks, and cause big fuckin a-splosions everywhere. This film is rated 12 (some partial nudity, mild swearwords and nasal drug abuse), and will be appearing in cinemas across Gloucestershire this August.

Labels: disaster politics, environment, hollywood