28 Weeks Later

It is impossible in this day and age to make a military film that involves the USA and not have it be about Iraq.It could be the text or the subtext, but it will be there. And all you really need over the course of the text or subtext is to have a well formed argument. Pro or con, it doesn't matter, just as long as it makes sense and can stand up to a little scrutiny.

Zombie movies have a long history of having social commentary thrust onto them. Most of the blame for this has to do with George Romero's accidental trick casting in Night of the Living Dead. Shoving political discussion into the gaping maw of gore films is generally the worst thing you can do. Sexual politics, sure I can buy that. Economics? Sign me up. Race relations? Erm what? American Foreign Policy? Better make it good.

And that is the problem with 28 Weeks Later. Every bit of subtext in this film is trying to be critical of our current idiotic expedition in Iraq, but every parallel the film makes is completely specious. Like most claims of "we are fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here," the vast majority of Iraq policy commentary in fiction tends to be knee jerk criticism of a bad situation by people that lack the information needed to really address it properly.

And that is 28 Weeks Later's greatest flaw.

First lets take the main idea behind the film--America leads a NATO mission to rebuild and repopulate the United Kingdom after a viral outbreak decimates the population and to get a start on it, the US Army sets up a "Green Zone" in London. The plan falls apart when a woman is found in London who is a carrier for the virus, but not infected. She infects her husband and gory man eating ensues.

We did not invade Iraq to rebuild and repopulate. We needed to rebuild the country AFTER we invaded, but as a reason to set up shop there that wasn't it. We went into Iraq to take out Saddam Hussein. The Green Zone part is the obviously trying to be a corollary to the Green Zone in Iraq, but instead of keeping terrorists out, the London Green Zone is keeping civilians in, which is precisely the thing the virus needs to spread quickly--bunches of people to infect all in one place.

In the film, the General in charge, trying to control a rapidly deteriorating situation, promptly and correctly launches the Code Red plan. This is the right thing to do to protect the rest of the world. Strategically the idea is sound and it is the morally correct thing to do to keep the virus from spreading.

The two main regular Army characters, a doctor and a sniper, see this liquidation of the population as a bad situation and try to get the children of the carrier out of the city to be studied for the possibility of a cure--all against orders. Also the right thing to do until the boy gets infected which is when they should've killed him.

None of this works as Iraq criticism. Showing the General in charge as a competent man and the individual soldiers as people with faces and families does not do the job. If you are criticizing the Iraq situation, where are the parallels in the story to the Bush Administration? If it doesn't fit into the milieu of the film, then why is their so much obvious Iraq imagery (the main character's sniper rifle is painted with a desert-scheme camouflage--Green Zone--US Army shown mowing down civilians--etc)? If it isn't, then you have the problem then that the overall message of the film is that it is better to stand around and do nothing in the face of the annihilation of the human race than to try to fight it because the person trying to find the cure for the disease ends up causing the virus to spread to other countries. One cannot assume that any artist in this day and age would be enough of a sanctimonious prick to suggest apathy in the face of a preventable apocalypse.

On top of this, the film as a dearth of internal logic. Why are the civilians herded into holding areas at the outbreak of Code Red? Why weren't they told this would happen? Why aren't the doors sturdier? Why aren't their soldiers guarding the doors? How does a guy manage to go into a biohazard situation and not get noticed by the guards? Why was a potentially infected individual brought into the Green Zone in the first place? She just as easily could've been triaged and assessed and disposed of outside the safety area. And then you have the soldiers positioned in a perfect Odessa Steps position to slaughter fleeing civilians in a situation where, if the civilians are all corralled into holding areas, the civilians were under control. Why was the electricity cut?

This film suffers from the worst case of idiot plot I have ever seen.

On the other hand, it has its moments of genuine scariness and suspense; something that most zombie movies don't have. And yes, these movies are zombie movies no matter what Danny Boyle says.

The film shoots for the topical and misses and falls into the same trap that most horror movies that try fall in to: inconsequence. If you are a filmmaker, and you want to make a movie that is a commentary on some current event, please think it through.

Honest Discourse

In retrospect, The Captive Mind is a great book. Though it could've done without the profiles of Gamma and Delta, two of the writers that Milosz uses as examples of intellectual laziness and moral weakness. The real tragic stories are Alpha and Beta (these are real people that for some reason Milosz did not want to name, but are easily identified). These were men of great feeling and talent who were brought low by the moral morass and intellectual short cuts that Diamat creates.

One can see the parallels between these men and their struggles and the political situation that is occurring in our country today. Whether or not this is a good thing or not is a difficult problem to suss out. On one hand Milosz maintains that intellectuals are easily swayed by counter-intuitive systems (they can justify anything with their intellect, no matter how stomach turning), and on the other, America has no real intelligentsia. The closest thing we have are celebrities and talking heads on the TV news. Chomsky is as much of a joke as Anne Coulter, and no matter how much sense George Clooney might be spouting about Darfur and the peccadilloes of the Republican party , it doesn't change the fact he was in Batman & Robin.

The writers out there are not writing about our social and political problems. Art has become apolitical; either it is completely without substance, pure artifice (Warhol, Pollack, that guy who did the squares), or it is made to titillate and shock (that guy who pissed on a sculpture of Jesus, that sculpture of Britney Spears giving birth). The closest we get as a culture to actual constructive dialog about the state of our country is through mass entertainment (which I just wrote as inert tainment for some reason--damn you Freud), but this is powered more by corporate funding of entertainment than it is by actual concern about the human condition in America (thus Chomsky and Coulter--the two mouthpieces of the political divide).

Where is the American Tolstoy, or Grass, or Mishima, or Orwell? Our writers are too busy writing books that are more about being books than they are about saying something about us. Our intellectuals are too busy thinking up new ways to over complicate things than to come up with ideas that help our society. The days of Twain and Steinbeck, Frederick Douglas and MLK have passed us by and we are left with intellectuals and artists with very narrow lines of sight, such as Andrea Dworkin and Irving Kristol, Jonathan Safran Foer and Don Delillo. These artistic and intellectual navel gazers do a disservice to their country by not engaging the public in honest discourse or, at the worst, engaging them in DISHONEST discourse. This dishonest discourse is the trap of Dialectical Materialism, the trap that Milosz wrote about, but instead of the Stalinist Method, you have a method based entirely of discriminating against the under-educated (which is an artificial scale if there ever was one).

American intellectuals are radical and militant by nature, neither concerned with the everyday problems of the world or with honest practice. Our intellectuals wave their credentials in front of the public's faces, say "I know more than you", and proceed to vent their ideas onto the public with out any course of redress or dialectics--because if you are not a Ph.D. holder or fellow intellectual, you obviously have nothing to bring to the table so you better just nod say "yessir" and bow to my big, overeducated brain. This paradigm is a detriment to our society--it diminishes our democratic system and our populist nature. You cannot have the American flavor of populism with monolithic, discriminatory intellectual practices.

Writers come in all shapes and sizes and types. But the social commentator in American letters has either died out or not changed with the times. Don Delillo recycles the same worn-out criticisms about the very American populism that could save our political soul from the ravages of Dominionism, fascism and intellectual laziness. Foer, the current golden boy among the po-mo writers of America, proceeds to crawl further up his own ass with every book he writes. By not engaging the public in discourse, and recycling old intellectual chestnuts and not developing, they present their works of art as either artistic thought pieces or art for art sake. So the public, criticised again and unengaged by the artistic self-fellatio, buys a Dan Brown book instead (hate to say it, but score one for the public).

Then, on top of all of this, you have a monolithic media culture that does its best to keep the populace somnambulant. American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, ER, CSI, The Office, The Daily Show, Rush Limbaugh, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News--all spewed upon the masses as alternatives to each other when they all just spout the same laziness or encourages it by its very nature. Shows of actual artistic merit are few and far between. It would be better to be a universalist show, describing the human condition on a nebulous scale (ie Seinfeld, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer), than it would be to be a show that encourages the turning off of one's brain. Read Hemingway before you read Dan Brown, watch Buffy before you watch Idol, because the days of Steinbeck and All in the Family (actual commentaries on the America in the era in which they were created) are over.

We are at the point of needing a renaissance for our discourse, a popular culture that has rigor and virility and does not shy away from entering into dialog about society's ills with its audience.

Movies and Politics

I have heard a lot of interpretations of the movie 300 than I care to really think about, and the fact of the matter is most interpretations of the film are wrong. It is not homophobic, anti-Iranian, a liberal treatise on the fight against hegemony or a neo-conservative wet-dream about soldiers fighting and dying for "what the believe".

None of these are the case. 300 is exactly what it appears to be: a big dumb action movie without any inherent political statement at all. Except for maybe that when a movie like this is is seen by people far and wide, it becomes political litmus paper. You paint this canvas with your own psyche.

The Spartans can be the Americans, if you are a conservative that likes the idea of the righteousness of the warrior, or the Persians can be Americans, if you are a liberal that sees the current actions of our country's government as being hegemonic and imperial.

And of course, how can a movie with so much flexing man-meat on display actually be homophobic? Because the bad guy is a bit swishy? I don't think say.

The Spartans themselves don't even make a good stand in for America, historically speaking--they were exclusive and isolationist. They despised the more liberal democracies of Greece and produced no art, outlawed immigration and warred constantly with their neighbors.

The Perisans don't either--dynastic empire with forced conscription.

They're better suited to being stand ins for the Soviets and the Chinese.

Of course this movie isn't history, it is a fantasy. So that point could go either way, really.

But the fact is this movie is pure violent eye-candy and nothing but, and damn good eye-candy at that. I've seen it twice and think it is a great, fun movie.

The political movie of the season that people seem to be ignoring it Antoine Fuqua's Shooter. This movie is an American Centrist statement against outlaw government agencies, independent mercenary armies and the use of a good man with gun for ill by the powers that be. It is seeped in righteous indignation, wells used political statements and is being accused of being what it isn't: a big, dumb action movie.

Shooter has for the liberal/centrist set the shadowy government agency acting outside the law, the conspiracy to cover up bad dealings and a Blackwater stand-in. It rails against the military industrial complex and out government's use of mercenaries.

For the centrist/conservative it has the lone man standing up for justice, out of control government that allows for bad things to shuffled under rugs, the military-industrial complex doing the bad things, a law and order system that actually works and shouts out a big commercial for private gun ownership.

And in the end of the movie it drives home an American idea, or maybe myth, that one man can make a difference, even if it is a just a drop in the bucket of the wrongs of the world.

And it's good eye candy with great action sequences.

Science Fiction

The social ramifications of technological advancements are the bread and butter of the SF, but the tendency for SF authors to leave out a large amount of the political ramifications, is the current and most disturbing short coming. I am referring here to singularity fiction.

Not only is the political aspects of the singularity virtually ignored in the process, but when it comes to the post-human trend (personality uploads, etc.) the ubiquitous nature of this advancement is what is usually played up. The problem with this is the shirking class. The majority of the world is poor, and thus, the majority of the world would be unable to make the transition from human to post-human. Much like the current trends in life-extension and cryogenics being the playground of the rich and powerful, the post-human experience will be one undertaken by the elite of society, not the rank-and-file.

All new concepts and technology bering with them the specter of abuse by the powerful. In this aspect of the singularity, you would have the rich and powerful--as computer uploaded, computer-based beings--doing what they always do: rule over the common man with an iron fist.

Just as newsreels, movies, print, and the internet itself found themselves to be tools used by the powerful to propagandize the masses, the post-human era would be the first true era complete, permanent despotic, fascist rule. The elite leaders of the world would not fear assassination, revolution or dissent. They would be the first true totalitarians who would live in impenetrable castles.

Nero, Franco, Hitler and Stalin had much more to fear from the world around them than, say, an uploaded personality structure of Dick Cheney, ruling the country from a harddrive in an undisclosed location (Greenbrier Hotel).

This is were dystopian literature can enlighten the current trend of post-singularity SF as being rather benign. Because SF should be used as a warning to the present, and not an optimistic-technology-can-save-us-all cure-all, SF authors should look beyond the singularity, beyond the obscure economic theory, and show their readership what can happen when new technology is taken by governments who feel their grip on power being taken away and decentralized. In the age of RFID-traced passports, gps-enabled cellular phones, traffic cameras, hard-to-get driver's licenses, etc. the only thing we have to fear is the technology that surrounds us, and its misuse by the powers that be.

Because of the lack of universality in current SF fiction, these problems are not being addressed. The government is an organ of society that is ignored, derided and treated as if it is a non-issue. This should not be the case. We are living in a Cyberpunk 1984, surrounded by high tech trappings that ensconce us in a datastream that is traceable by the panopticon of government. As corporations, through lobbying and special-interest groups, think tanks, etc. gain more and more favor in the halls of the governmental system, they will become power hungry, and in this hunger, they will not be satisfied with staying independent money-making entities; they will eventually enfranchise themselves into the very system of government that controls us all. The cyberpunk ideal of corporations as entities that are more powerful than governments is mostly a short-sighted cold war concept; soon enough the governments will become corporations. Democracy brought to you by Coca Cola and Sony. And in this money-drenched dystopia, the human element becomes one or corporate commodity; society as a giant company town. We are but a few generations away from West Virginia Coal Wars part 2, but on a global scale, and with much more at stake than getting paid in actual money and an 8-hour work day.

The very freedom and liberty that is the basis of the modern (western) world will soon be trumped by the almighty dollar, much in the way science trumped faith in the age of enlightenment.

The economics of the future will be in the trading of control, much in the way it is now, but we will be embedded in world of state capitalism. Stalinesque Sovietism the sequel, but instead of the overlying dogma of the empowered masses, it will be the covenant of the corporate state--everything in its right place for the advancement of the societal credit rating. When ever action a citizen/employee takes has ramifications upon their overall credit rating (cash economies gone the way of the dodo bird), there can be no freedom of conscience, no freedom of speech, no freedom at all except to pursue credit for the sake of the state. If all the gears in an engine put power to the wheel,s then the engine is working. Do not worry about the current international crisis, just go buy stuff--but don't buy the WRONG stuff. Nothing used, nothing imported independently. Do not date outside your socio-economic strata, do not move out of the subburbs.

If you must imagine the future, imagine a quarterly credit report stamping on a human face forever.