Pilger on Oscar
I like cultural crit. Think it should be encouraged.
Why are so many films so bad? This year’s Oscar nominations are a parade of propaganda, stereotypes and downright dishonesty. The dominant theme is as old as Hollywood: America’s divine right to invade other societies, steal their history and occupy our memory. When will directors and writers behave like artists and not pimps for a world view devoted to control and destruction?
The question of how Hollywood constructs collective memory is worthy of a thread.
What is meant by the term “industrial murder”?
On The Hurt Locker he heaps his invective:
Her film offers a vicarious thrill via yet another standard-issue psychopath high on violence in somebody else’s country where the deaths of a million people are consigned to cinematic oblivion. The hype around Bigelow is that she may be the first female director to win an Oscar. How insulting that a woman is celebrated for a typically violent all-male war movie.
And this teaser:
By contrast, the fate of an admirable American war film, “Redacted,” is instructive. Made in 2007 by Brian De Palma, the film is based on the true story of the gang rape of an Iraqi teenager and the murder of her family by American soldiers. There is no heroism, no purgative. The murderers are murderers, and the complicity of Hollywood and the media in the epic crime in Iraq is described ingeniously by De Palma. The film ends with a series of photographs of Iraqi civilians who were killed. When it was ordered that their faces be blacked out “for legal reasons,” De Palma said, “I think that’s terrible because now we have not even given the dignity of faces to this suffering people. The great irony about ‘Redacted’ is that it was redacted.” After a limited release in the US, this fine film all but vanished.
And on, ahem… Avatar:
Non-American (or nonwestern) humanity is not deemed to have box office appeal, dead or alive. They are the “other,” who are allowed, at best, to be saved by “us.” In “Avatar,” James Cameron’s vast and violent money-printer, 3-D noble savages known as the Na’vi need a good guy American soldier, Sgt. Jake Sully, to save them. This confirms they are “good.” Natch.
Read ther parts on Invictus, a film I’ll avoid as long as possible, because it takes its name from a paen to egoism written by William Earnest Henley – maybe one of the worst poems ever written by my lights.
And Pilger’s disturbing description of Up in the Air:
The film most nominated for an Oscar and promoted by the critics is “Up in the Air,” which has George Clooney as a man who travels America sacking people and collecting frequent flyer points. Before the triteness dissolves into sentimentality, every stereotype is summoned, especially of women. There is a bitch, a saint and a cheat. However, this is “a movie for our times,” said director Jason Reitman, who boasts having cast real sacked people. “We interviewed them about what it was like to lose their job in this economy,” said he, “then we’d fire them on camera and ask them to respond the way they did when they lost their job. It was an incredible experience to watch these non-actors with 100 per cent realism.”
What say y’all?
DeAnander:
porn.
12 February 2010, 5:08 pmRichard:
I didn’t know that about Up in the Air when I saw it; that is a bit disturbing. And yet, I enjoyed the movie and actually thought it was an interesting film for these times. I usually like Pilger, and think he’s mostly on point in this piece, but in general feels he’s off-base on this movie (again, with the caveat that I didn’t know the background about the interviewees).
12 February 2010, 7:12 pm(Boer) Tom:
I find Pilger a bit reactionary here, on two levels. Firstly, the only thing approximating violence by blacks are a few cars flipped and burned during a protest (some friends dragged me along to see the film) – for a radical, to take that as violence is a rather strange position; I recall some scenes from one of the massacres at the beginning, and a portrayal of the racist attitudes of whites throughout – did he watch the film? Secondly, Rugby was an issue for that small group who cared about it, namely rugby fans, and a smaller group who felt strong animosity toward Afrikaners per se – mainly English white liberals, and to a lesser extent middle class blacks who were made under apartheid – the apartheid government started creating a middle class and associated industrialization in the ‘homelands’ after the first neoliberal packages around 1980, mainly for divide and rule – Steve Biko, writing a few years before, joked that the apartheid government had not yet mastered capitalism. Certain English white liberals were extremely suspicious of the ANC (though some English liberals were really great people – Douglas Bax deserves a mention) – scratch a liberal to find a reactionary generally – in Cape Town (where much of the film was made), I’ve only once come across hatred toward whites generally, and then from such a ready-made wealthy black guy (around 97). The only time I’ve gotten anywhere near assaulted was when some guy wanted to steal my bicycle (I used to cycle through shanty and slum areas and spread pamphlets against the ANC’s neoliberal package GEAR) – the worst I ever got otherwise was the kind of stare that says that I’m too young to know what I’m talking about. I’ve never heard of the majority of blacks back home caring about rugby – in fact, aside from some black women’s rugby teams, I’ve hardly come across any interest what so ever, until some friends dragged me to watch Invictus, where it appears as a huge issue. This whole notion of blacks being hyper-angry at whites just never was my experience – some fought hard against the system, with the support of the vast majority, but even the ANC accepted e.g. an Afrikaner police media infiltrator who defected from the apartheid security forces, and several Afrikaners joined or were otherwise affiliated with MK (the armed wing of the ANC) – resentment was notable for its absence, especially considering the relative wealth and attitudes of whites, and the violence of the apartheid state. A Geyer, who is now practically forgotten, recruited quite a few people for MK, who then also recruited, including a relative.
At one point, the film gets a bit silly, when DF Malan in Cape Town is presented as an English medium high school (I did grade eight there before dropping out of school for a few years – it was and is very much Afrikaans medium – when I attended shortly after the fall of apartheid, non-white Afrikaans speakers – who are the majority of Afrikaans speakers – were already enrolling to a remarkable degree, considering the distances they often had to travel) – rugby at that school was forced down our throats, by a middle-aged and otherwise very friendly and rather lefty teacher, who did a linguistics degree in southern Bantu languages.
Pilger (and sadly a few others, e.g. Klein) get a bit silly when it gets to South Africa, as if they feel some guilt for being white, and want to project it on Afrikaners. I’m not sure what that is supposed to do – the first neoliberal packages (80s) greatly harmed Afrikaner trade-unions, and many of those people are now moving into shanty towns (certain parts of Pretoria) – given the fascistic nature of the militarized apartheid government, that rarely shied from letter-bombing campaigns abroad, I wonder what Pilger et al. propose these worker should have done? Smuts after all in his day called the airforce to bomb striking white workers – sure clandestine solidarity work and an end to the soft white-supremacist attitudes would have been welcome, but it would not in itself have stopped neo-liberalism, nor reduced the violence of the apartheid state – Cuba did that (in Angola) with a whole army – and then Mandela thanked them by trying to placate USA, which had continued to fund apartheid indirectly during the sanctions, e.g. by showering honours on Suharto.
13 February 2010, 2:01 amWinston Warfield:
“Up in the Air” got a good review on CP, but I was uncomfortable in finding out about the voyeuristic technique of using real victims of economic calamity in the movie. I haven’t seen it, and may not, now. I was on the receiving end of an “economic execution” last year, ejected out of the airlock of gainful employment into deep space, and can attest to the shock and dismay of losing security, benefits, the whole nine yards. Especially with kids growing up and needing an education. It’s being economically “disappeared”; your workplace buddies don’t call, and don’t answer calls. You’ve got joblessness cancer, the terror of being unplugged from the machine, the great fear for those at work and those trying to get back in. Not complaining, mind you, because “it is what it is”, so to speak, and victimhood is just embarrassing and giving in to the bastards. Am exploring the true and scary meaning of freedom. That is, freesom in Illich’s sense of (involuntary in my case) secession from the commodity economy to enter the world of use-value and creative austerity. But I digress. Sorry. Back to the culture thread. It’s good that such a movie about the assault on the working class gets made, a revelatory mirror that we as a crippled culture can use to see ourselves. It’s not good that the experience of being ruined becomes a spectacle, much like the “Survivor” series on TeeVee. That is disgusting, and I’m afraid speaks volumes about our cultural pathology.
13 February 2010, 8:41 amRegarding Pilger’s dismissal of Avatar (and I never miss anything he writes): I repeat, it’s a valid crit, but he throws out the baby with the bathwater.
Stan:
Winston, your description of being abruptly jobless is priceless. Sharing these stories and feelings is – in my view – a revolutionary practice… the first revolutionary practice.
The personal very much is the political.
13 February 2010, 9:56 amA. Edwards:
Stan, can I hijack this thread for a second? I wanted to pose this question a few entries back in relation to the JSOC post, however it looks like the comments are closed. If this is totally out of line my feelings won’t be hurt if you move the answer to email or whatever works.
So, this article about the Austrian millionaire giving away his money (I almost wanted to capitalize millionaire as if it were a profession) contains his belief that–paraphrasing–’money gets in the way of true happiness.’ I saw this and thought of your own refutation of spec ops from the JSOC post. The connection I see is that it’s almost as if a person has to go ahead and attain the supposed virtue before he or she can then dismiss it with any authority. No doubt, there are exceptions and the like, however in your case my feeling is that your criticism is charged with added value/interest because you where there–in Delta for crying out loud, the most special of the special units. Which is only to say you’re not the run of the mill objector. In the millionaire’s case, he now gives this fortune away and criticizes the ‘five star lifestyle.’
Aside from the rarity of both millionaire lifestyles and special ops mastery, there’s a component to each title whereby an outsider generally assumes some combination of extraordinary talent/work/sacrifice or the like. The idea that it was earned, which in both these cases it technically probably was–the guy apparently built himself up, wasn’t a blueblood prior just as you weren’t the son of a general.
In light of this ‘experience before credibility’ aspect and taken in conjunction with your comments in the JSOC post I’m really wondering if you would expound on your feelings about ‘owning’ the experience of Delta, or any other ‘special’ training. What I’m really trying to get at is something relative to masculinity ie. does being a man require or ask for him to undergo some dark, difficult, illusory experience? And also, less academic but perhaps more to the point of my query is this: the fact of the matter is that, even a decade out (rusty), your training does put you in a somewhat superior position vis a vis survival even–that is if we remove the purely violent aspect of the training and titles to which you were the recipient.
Basically I just want to know if you think you would have arrived at this place in your life if you hadn’t already weighted the other side of the scales, so to speak. I read Eric Haney and I see a very different man in some respects, though he doesn’t strike me as entirely dumb or immoral. Not the greatest writer I ever read, but…still.
Thanks. A.
14 February 2010, 6:32 pmA. Edwards:
Here’s the article on the millionaire: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/11/karl-rabeder-austrian-mil_n_458774.html
14 February 2010, 6:34 pmStan:
@A: One of the reasons I backed so far away from the veterans’ peace movmement – which remains one of the most effective arms of that movement, sometimes even the head of it, is that I began to weary of the role of Public Peace Veteran (PPV), trademark, identity, etc. I said so many of the same things, answered the same questions with what came to be the same answers, became so fluent that I began to feel like an old vinyl record. Talking about it was not therepeutic, it was tiresome, even though many reassured me that it was fresh for people first hearing it. For a long time I stayed at it because it was where I could be most useful to the peace movement.
I still weigh in on peace issues, and I still repeat myself, but I’d dropped public venues; then I had to go to work at jobs.
There wasn’t a day went by that I didn’t squirm beneath the knot of being valued for what I used to do because I was no longer doing it.
My fear, or my ethical concern, was that people, especially young males, would see the public esteem that was attaching to me from a peace movement that is grateful for the credibility and immunization that veterans give them; and that these young males would consider mapping what they saw in their imaginations as similar course… then join the military to get the experience to get the public esteem.
This thought was always curled up in the corner while I was thinking about and writing Sex & War, because public esteem – a la Hartsock – is identified as the deepest motive force for many men who elect for military careers.
Eric and I were pretty close for about three years, and he was unusual in the trade because he was more literate than the average operator at Delta. I won’t say more on that, because I don’t want to gossip.
This idea that men have to undergo some trial in the underworld is a prominent story convention of masculinity, so it is something that is readily recognizable by the whole culture; and the culture responds to it. The lines between entertaining fiction snd reality have been dangerously blurred; and I suspect that many who admired whatever it was I was doing were admiring this convention (with no recognition of its gendering), and missed the main point – that warmaking has no redeeming value.
For myself, I want people to hear the message I carried after the blindness on the road to Damascus, not focus on the docudrama they think I was in when I was still a violent Pharisee.
“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” is what Paul told his colleagues; and I second that (italics added). There is neither need nor profit in joining the military as a way of backgrounding yourself for some future role. There’s too much of that kind of overdramatization and playacting in today’s alienated and performance-based world.
One needn’t look far to find moral dilemmas. They find you. On whatever path.
The valuable kernel in the whistleblower role that I was cast for is the witness. I want to establish some bona fides in talkiing about JSOC, for example, but I don’t want to focus the discussion on me and what I did or didn’t do. The value is the witness, and that means telling people what they don’t know about this strange and powerful sub-culture.
On survival, the average carpenter or secretary has more survival skills than me, in the real world… unless you add a gun.
15 February 2010, 8:34 amStan:
btw, the thread wasn’t closed on JSOC, there’some kind of weird cyber-glitch, probably the NSA. (joke)
But here’s an interesting piece from CP and David Price today on “human terrain systems” (gotta love that military techno-drivel):
FULL
15 February 2010, 2:51 pmLisa:
Are Corporations Using the Internet to Accelerate Our Cultural, Political and Economic Decline?
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
Posted on February 16, 2010, Printed on February 17, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145683/
This article first appeared on TruthDig.
The Internet has become one more tool hijacked by corporate interests to accelerate our cultural, political and economic decline. The great promise of the Internet, to open up dialogue, break down cultural barriers, promote democracy and unleash innovation and creativity, has been exposed as a scam. The Internet is dividing us into antagonistic clans, in which we chant the same slogans and hate the same enemies, while our creative work is handed for free to Web providers who use it as bait for advertising.
The rest at:
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/145683
17 February 2010, 8:39 pmCurt:
Lisa,
18 February 2010, 7:32 amI think the best comment after the article that you linked was the comment that said, if you had a brilliant idea that could make you millions and the lives of millions of people better would you rather be robbed or ignored?
Now of course some one could say that is cheating that I am setting up a false choice. Still I think the comment is a good one.
Jim Barnes:
Be your own guru or gee you are you, find the go(o)d within. Both share equidistant points from “work out your own salvation”. Illumination comes at a price and sadly that price can be the dissolution of everything we have held dear up until the recognition of our loss and its cause.
War in my opinion, has always been an excuse for those of a like mind to carry out things that they would never do in polite society. Rape, pillage, kill, destroy all under the guise of necessity but with willingness aforethought. The mongers know this and so war becomes controlled chaos with the forces being the coal face and the politicians, and corporations reaping the whirlwind. Sadly such participation is promoted on the basis of ethical and moral duty to the state. Then awarded recognition, that the individual believes they have earned and, which the mongers have foisted on mass conciousness as being the warriors right all in an attempt to assuage conscience. It has become an ingrained and endemic staus quo from the most ancient times and is similar to that awarded to sports heroes for throwing a ball or scoring a goal.
An individual seeking to know the state of their existence is precluded from doing so until they have the benefit of hindsight or retrospect. We can postulate the outcome but never know the real conclusion until it is confronted. Introspect, allows us to consider that which has passed and our motivation. Or, examine our current situation in light of what we have learned with cathartic moments exploding in our consciousness. As we discover, the unconsidered links from one set of behavioral parameters to the next.
We ask why cant the world become enlightened and the answer is simple the individual has to find it for themself and to start with they have to want to find it and then accept what it is that they find. Certainly moments of cognition can come from the discourse or teachings of others but these are like breadcrumbs helping us find our way home they are not the entire story.
On the subject of movies they are only shadows playing out on a lit screen. they are meant to entertain not educate. Certainly there are illustrative moments within the storyline which can provide insight into the writers perspective. But again these are not the entire story. Without reference most of them pass unnoticed, like the oil being forced down the marines throat in Three Kings or the similarity to a cowboy and indian movie that Avatar elicits. Yet even within what may seem to be disillusioning propaganda there is always a back story. When the morale is that the bad guy never wins, then neither does the corrupt good guy.
As to the hijacking of the internet there is more to worry about with government regulation controlling accessibility and monitoring than there is with corporate predation. Certainly advertising is corporate hyperbole, but our willingness to accept authoritarian reign over our intelligence and our responsibility is more troublesome. The internet had its birth as a military device which was hijacked by academics, which was hijacked by companies and is now being hijacked by the computer literate activists. Corporations and Governments may control the infrastructure but the only real control they have is if they switched it off. That would be akin to turning off the electricity or the telephone system. So far as its influence on our personal choices it is no different to television, radio or newspapers in earlier generations, its just more wide spread.
Instead of a regional or national impact it is having a global one, but the converse is true as well. The protestors, activists, dissenters are also larger and they have access to the same technology (see indymedia.org).
As for copyright well if you don’t want to stand on a street corner shouting out your idea or handing out illustrative documents then why would you publish on the internet with out ensuring copyright and registering your intellectual property. Then again even if you wanted to challenge someones acquisition of your property could you afford to do so if they are a multinational conglomeration, regardless of how they acquired it.
In the end its not what your thinking but what your doing that counts.
22 February 2010, 12:40 amJim:
Amazing post by Paul Craig Roberts:
The Road to Armageddon: The Insane Drive for American Hegemony Threatens Life on Earth
http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=37509
26 February 2010, 4:26 pmLisa:
This Is One of the Biggest Wall Street Frauds Ever…
By Porter Stansberry:
February 26, 2010 “S&A Digest”- February 25, 2010– One of the best lessons I’ve learned over my career as an investment analyst is the myth of excellent management or “great execution” is really just that – a myth.
When I see companies in troubled industries reporting quarter after quarter of great results, while all of their peers are getting killed, I know a fraud is going on. I remember in the early 2000s, WorldCom kept reporting profits when all of the other long-distance carriers were getting killed. I knew it couldn’t last. And it didn’t. WorldCom’s accounting was revealed to be a fraud – the company was counting its network access costs as capital expenses. Once the real numbers came out, the company collapsed in what was the largest bankruptcy in American history at that point.
About three years ago, I saw Goldman Sachs reporting quarter after quarter of unbelievable results when all of the other investment banks were hurting. I spent a lot of time looking at its numbers – which didn’t make any sense. It reminded me of Enron. It kept reporting bigger and bigger profits, but lost more money every year in cash. And its debt balances kept growing.
I wrote a lot about this in The Digest, but I never officially recommended shorting Goldman in my newsletter because I literally couldn’t figure out how Goldman Sachs was doing it. I couldn’t find the smoking gun… but I knew a giant fraud would be discovered there, eventually.
In October 2008, I figured out part of the big secret: Goldman had insured all of its subprime exposure via AIG. This allowed it to book huge profits on its subprime investments long before they were actually paid off because the bonds were insured. Of course, it was all a sham – AIG didn’t have nearly enough money to pay off any of the insurance. (See the October issue of PSIA for more details.) A source close to the company even told me how big the exposure to AIG really was – $20 billion. That’s roughly 100% of the profit Goldman claimed in 2006 and 2007, at the height of the credit bubble. Goldman completely denied my report and claimed it had zero exposure to AIG.
As was subsequently revealed in the spring of 2009, my report was right on the money. Goldman had roughly $20 billion in exposure to AIG and received roughly $14 billion of money the federal government used to bail out AIG.
But I completely missed one big part of the story… And once this fact becomes common knowledge, it will probably mean jail time for several leading Goldman executives and the end of the firm. What did I miss? The entire Goldman-AIG relationship was a complete sham. Let me explain…
Goldman eventually admitted it had insured roughly $20 billion worth of subprime CDOs with AIG and had major exposure to the firm. But the New York Federal Reserve and Goldman Sachs never revealed this critical fact: Goldman didn’t merely buy insurance on a bunch of random subprime CDOs. It actually bought insurance on special CDOs it had put together and sold to its own clients. In other words, Goldman knew more about these CDOs than anyone else. Goldman bought insurance on these CDOs because it knew they’d collapse.
This is tantamount to building a house, planting a bomb in it, selling it to an unsuspecting buyer, and buying $20 billion worth of life insurance on the homeowner – who you know is going to die!
These facts all came to light because of research done by the office of Darrell Issa, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. These new documents will certainly lead to a full investigation of the Goldman-AIG dealings and the subsequent $180 billion bailout led by the New York Federal Reserve. My bet? Heads will roll. If you own Goldman Sachs, you’d better sell.
26 February 2010, 9:43 pmcyndi:
i liked crazy heart.
5 March 2010, 11:18 pmHenry:
On March 1st — this coming Monday– the premier episode of a 90 part series, “Sleepless in Gaza…and Jerusalem” will be launched on YouTube. It will be a video diary about four young Palestinian women, Muslim and Christian, two living in Gaza and two in Arab Jerusalem/West Bank.
PINA TV Production camera crews will be covering Ashira Ramadan, a broadcast journalist based in Jerusalem; Ashira’s friend in Gaza, the documentary film maker Nagham Mohanna; Donna Maria Mattas, a 17 year-old student at the Holy Family school in Gaza who dreams of growing up to be a journalist, and Ala’ Khayo Mkari who works with Caritas in Jerusalem.
.
The intention of this series is neither rant nor rhetoric. It is rather an opportunity for all of us, who do not live in Gaza, occupied Arab Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, to grasp how these four young Palestinian women live out their daily lives, precisely because their lives are stories we journalists were taught almost dismissively to think of as “human interest” and almost necessarily conflict driven.
How, as human beings, these four Palestinians can also experience moments of personal and community achievement, and the warmth of friends and family life that in real life is possible even in the most difficult circumstances of siege and occupation.
Each episode runs 26 minutes and will be shot in Jerusalem/West Bank and Gaza, edited and uploaded the same day. So you will find a new sequence six days a week at http://www.youtube.com/SleeplessinGaza. On Friday, we all rest.
A “Sleepless…” trailer should be up on YouTube by the time you receive this letter. We also have just set up “Sleepless in Gaza…and Jerusalem” on Facebook. It’s got such a long URL that Facebookers should note– just type in “Sleepless in Gaza…and Jerusalem” in the Facebook search and you will be home. We don’t have our own domain website yet, but our partners PINA TV Productions’ website will serve as such for the time being at http://www.pina.ps.
This is a personal note as much as it is a press release, so it is going out on my email but after today you can reach us at SleeplessinGaza@gmail.com.
Please pass this letter on to your friends on email and to organizations that believe in peace on earth and good will to all, that they too might spread the word.
8 March 2010, 4:41 pmJon:
You’ve gotta love this old bird (even though I’m neither an Austrian nor a Libertarian). They hardly make them like that anymore.
——————————————————
Writing in late January [1994], it is already too clear that the fix is in, even more than usual, on the Academy Awards. The earlier awards, of the New York Film Critics Circle, the Golden Globes of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and other lesser lights, have presaged the main event.
Those Awards
by Murray N. Rothbard
The Oscars have increasingly taken on the dimensions of a racket. Since the eligible movies are those that emerge at any point during the calendar year, and since the producers fully understand the minuscule attention span of the typical Academy dimwit, all the Big Pictures, calculated to appeal to said dimwit, are held back until December 30 or 31. As a result, the experts were confidently predicting awards in late December to movies that no one had yet seen. The major studios have always had special previews for Academy members (i.e., Oscar voters) for the pictures they are hyping for the awards; now, that has been supplemented by videocassettes expressed to the homes of each voter.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard112.html
9 March 2010, 7:05 am