I, perhaps did not anticipate that I would end up coming to view this as equal parts a criticism, and discussion of the film. Though, this is perhaps, do to my own failing, prior to watching of what it is to be "reviewing" a film dialectically. So, I must apologize for having preempted this to people as being a review. It is not, it is a critique and as we all know, criticism is a gift, and all I can hope is that this dialogue contines.
The Class Character
It is forgotten that Marx's thesis—that men become conscious of fundamental conflicts on the terrain of ideology—has an organic value; it is an epistemological rather than a psychological or moral thesis. This forgetting results in a frame of mind that looks on politics and all of history as a marche de dupes, a matter of conjuring tricks and sleight of hand.
-Antonio Gramsci, in his third prison notebook.
I would perhaps be remiss to call the work that I had the privilege of watching, cinematic as it was certainly, more accurately, art. As Lu Xun tells us, "there is no revolutionary poetry," so too, there is no revolutionary film. Perhaps the existence of the artisan (a distinct class which we'll address in just a few moments) as a class-entity outside of capital allows us, and this is myself included when I write, that we can be outside of or, worse, superior to capital. Now, why do I refuse to call this cinematic? Because the cinema is the realm of modernism, and ultimately, perfected under the post-modern condition. This, is something much more essential, much more human.
It is a call to arms. A call that as we hear the words echo, in the classical music at the end, juxtaposed with graceful beauty at every pass, demands something of us. It does not show us, it does not simply offer itself without meaning. The imagery of the ballet, juxtaposed, elegantly with the losing monologue, it is not cinematic it is, and I mean this, in the most positive sense of the term propagandistic. It was a statement in defense of my class, that, as any member of most group chats I was in while I was watching it can confirm, brought tears to my eyes. As some may remember from my piece trying to define culture I was not unclear about my view on propaganda. It, is not, must not be, a dirty word. If your art is not propaganda of your class, then it is, quite simply, shit.
The best thing that can be said for this is that it is not film but that it is theatre. I mean this in the way that it fulfills the requirements of Cmrd. Amiri Baraka when he wrote on The Revolutionary Theatre, "The Revolutionary Theatre must take dreams and give them a reality. It must isolate the ritual and historical cycles of reality. But it must be food for all these who need food, and daring propaganda for the beauty of the Human Mind. It is a political theatre, a weapon to help in the slaughter of these dimwitted fat-bellied white guys who somehow believe that the rest of the world is here for them to slobber on." And, indeed, it is this.
This, ultimately, only serves to establish something key, the class character of this work of theatre itself.
The Aesthetic Sense
The God of the damned cannot know the God of the damner, that is, cannot know he is God.
Amiri Baraka, Expressive Language
The aesthetics largely break into three distinct sections. I have divided my aesthetic summary of the film by them. Replication leads into Sublimation, and finally, this all lends itself to our ultimate goal. The theatre as a purgative. It goes down like poison, harsh, hot, and unyielding, and Sublimation is when it strengthens itself. It sees its own aesthetic-sense on the other side. Sublimation, ultimately, allows for this piece of theatre to eliminate, from within itself the distance, pretension, and arrogance of post modernism. It is the final phase that I have chosen to call, Elimination.
Replication
The aesthetic and tone early is frenetic the endless scroll anxiety inducing hellishness driven on the one sided dialectic. The opening is unclear, a film reel, audience seats, scenery without a place. Then we enter to the meat of the post-modern. The words of Debord rang in my mind as I watched it, "What is a policeman? He is the active servant of the commodity, the man in complete submission to the commodity, whose job it is to ensure that a product of human labor remains a commodity." He said this, following the Watts Uprising in a piece called The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy. Then we enter the spectacle, bloodshed, carnage, commodity, the defense of it, take on a schizophrenic effect. It is the base of capital deterritorializing, shifting constantly reconstituting itself. Hellish imagery is flashed across the screen so fast that at times you feel like you may be missing it. Words and ideas join together with it at this pace. Topics break down and reform and ultimately are clarified only to be refabricated into new tools.
In the final scene of the opening sequence we see an image, the only one slow enough to be understood, the skull. The pace, like the imagery is post modern. Even the images of war which are textualized become decontextualized. The work takes on a seeming life of it's own an object without subject. Left free to run wild and dominate a relationship. It becomes the enlightenment notion that only the quantifiable is real. The subjective disappears in a flurry of imagery that reflects the words but never quite right. A simulacra within a semiographic series. We are given information, that seems to be immortal, but the jarring imagery is almost too much to handle.
Sublimation
The subject and object shift, as Adorno would say, and in this reversal suddenly we find a place. As this goes we gain ground. The critique of postmodernism is accompanied, still, by flashing images, devoid of their context, but in an act of irony that the postmodern should enjoy, becomes contextualized. They are given the authenticity that they are so devoid of. The meme, streaming (hidden in here is a beautiful art house joke), and social media, all build to what is key to the work. A series of images which are 1s and 0s, and an explanation, from Zuckerberg himself, of what the goal is. Of how your fingerprint is now data.
The work itself here, begins to take shape, we are no longer lost. We find ourselves, and like the man who has never been in the woods before, walking along the tree line, unaware that he's only a hundred yards from the exit, we are lifted above the trees. The aesthetic pace begins to slow, moving from frenetic to simply rapid. The audience is incorporated, gone, is the aesthetic pretension of the early phase of the movie. This is the bulk, it is us, being recontextualized, gifted with a place for us to engage ourselves in. As the helicopter sets us down, outside the tree line, we can see for ourselves where we are, and where our camp was. This, this phase is where we find out that we can act.
Elimination
As the theatre ends, Waiting for Lefty begins, we are called upon, as the audience to become participants in the striking out. The theatre begins it, it lashes out at what it can, as it can. Suddenly the pacing is soothing. The feelings of desperation, of regret over self-delusions. The call of Odets' Agate finally rings clear, meaning is fully returned. Suddenly, we are in time and a place. We are here, and we are in the now, capable of fighting back. "It did so for a simple reason, the imperialists fear US." Follows us being told that twilight is better than midnight, and that our feelings of hopelessness are intentional. We, are, in quite literal sense, shown that this darkness is not eternal, and like all epochs, this one, the era of the postmodern, of reaction, of a psycho-social plague, this one too will end. It is our duty to ensure it.
"The Mediator supplants the messenger": isn't this the very formula of the Christian revolution? The rubble of Mercury's statue strewn before Christ on the cross.
Regis Debray, Media Manifestos
The Theoretical Sense
It would perhaps be most easy for us to simply, and aggressively, leave this as the quality of aesthetic sense, but this is not a film driven by it's aesthetics, or even simply a piece of propagandistic theatre. It is, as much as anything, a work of theory. The facts presented here, are not to be called into question, their veracity is near indisputable. The research efforts within the piece are exhaustive, able to provide a wealth of information. The analysis, is not the facts of the thing qua themselves, and must be seen in context. Coincidentally, my analysis had led me to similar ideas, independent of the film, which I had only seen clips of really, via my friends. There are, in many ways, echoes and continuations of the work of Antonio Gramsci, the all important cultural theorist that he was, in both of our works.
The first, and essential key point to understand is that the artisan, or the artist, in traditional art can not and will not be able to truly be subsumed by capital. They are a formation that can not easily be treated by wage labor. The response to this is essential to understanding what will come after, and though it is discussed in passing, the work does not fully extrapolate here, and I think it needs clarity.
The death of theatre was a conscious effort to decrease the dialectical nature of theatre, in this case, its social connectedness. It took the act of performance and put it in isolation from all other performances. It took the energy of the audience and moved it to the movie theatre, and ultimately, into the home. There is a reason why sports bars prop up, and why they show the sports they do.
They exist in response to cooperation of certain beer companies, and certain sports with the US government in their propaganda and recruitment efforts. All media is propaganda, and the cinematic is propagandistic for the bourgeois. By doing so, the entrenchment of cinema was guaranteed, no longer were US sports political they became sterile, in opposition to the fecundity of the European soccer which has always been associated with these social ties. Recruitment became national, and eventually, international. The response to Ali was to only ever show team sports, those where the individual members of a team have almost no voice. The response to even the most milquetoast efforts of expression were to eliminate this.
I would like to add here some notes on the nature of screen-damage, the social media form, and the development of a sublimated populace. According to the “Zizekian” interpretation capital converts jouissance into value, through, seemingly no real explicable means, except the one he claims. However, In the real world, the one where the emotions of individuals don’t become some magical money machine, this economic form is downright insane. This is the opposite, as is often the case, with him, of true, the value of the experience is in the constant generation of content, the constant updating of the false-socius, and in the creation of profit for the bourgeois who own the app by profiting off it. Through the sale of private data.
Ironic distance is the space in which ideology operates. Which leads to a common occurrence wherein those who are deeply screendamaged or “perpetually online” turn to “irony” wherein their sincere feelings are so thoroughly ingrained that the lie and the truth merge into one statement. It reminds me here, that the work of Jaques Hebert was often considered "low brow" because of his sincerity, and yet, only one man truly spoke to and of the oppressed masses.
As this distance develops the users become increasingly gullible, satire ceases to be viable, and even the most over the top representations of an ideological form become treated as synonymous with the ideological form itself. Screen damage can be defined most easily a form of social alienation resulting from self-integration into the social media machine. It views irony as a primary means of communication, effectively developing the existence of the false-socius into a distance that comes to infect real life as well. Ultimately, creating a farcial version of oneself defined by advertising agencies.
This forced insincerity comes to be representative of the online culture as the self becomes sublimated to the persona adopted. In this insincere self it becomes impossible for the development of the self-conscious to occur on an individual, the self becomes deterritorialized and the vestiges of self-knowledge fade, leaving only an ironic detachment as a relation to reality.
We become, as the film so aptly puts it, a picture of ourselves viewed only through a mirror. The first call, and ultimately, the final call of the piece itself is to break with this fraudulent image. To become more fully himan, and to realize that you, like a collage, are greater than the singular images the spectacular machine takes of you.
It is now worth mentioning, that there is little more exposition that I can do here, regarding the theoretical content of the work itself that is not done by the work itself that would be additive, transformative, or eludicating.
That said, I can provide recommendations here for further reading that may be unfamiliar to some, likely without
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