Reply #56: Entertainment Empire

[Ghost Dog]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/dumb/story/0,,393990,00.html

A decade or two ago, one used to think an "entertainment empire" was an incidental, if highly profitable, aspect of serious political power and control. Now big corporations wield more power than national governments, and it is in their interest to make the world safe for shopping by promoting a pseudo-democratic "culture" where obedient workers obtain their rewards by consuming movies, TV, music, fashions, cigarettes and foods, and by making other "lifestyle" expenditures. "Rebellion" is part of the package of associated values offered with every purchase, but mostly within what would in the 70s have been called "the system", in the form of the rock star's circumscribed individual bravado rather than political or social protest.

Yet it is likely that sooner or later there will be some form of more organised resistance to these new kinds of imperialism. In fact some of the most conspicuous recent mainstream Hollywood movies themselves seem to smuggle in a measure of ironic criticism of the processes by which they are made and purveyed. The Richard Gere thriller Red Corner (1998) was about Western media corporations moving into the huge, corrupt new market of Communist China, and its lawyer-hero ends by rejecting his work for a US corporation and telling the US embassy to "Go to hell". The Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) had Jonathan Pryce as its villain, a Murdoch-like conspirator for world media domination. The Truman Show (1998) and The Matrix (1999), like Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall a few years back, are allegories of false consciousness, whose heroes are called to wake up to the illusoriness of the constructed world they only seem to inhabit, and, somehow, to dissolve it and break out.

Furthermore, it does not seem that the main reason for Hollywood's return to the Roman Empire as a subject in Ridley Scott's Gladiator is that CGI technology now allows one to fill in the missing bits of the Coliseum and crowd it with cheap digitally rendered extras. The sprawling, ethnically diverse Roman world the film presents holds many parallels with the US empire of today. In particular, its genuine traditions of representative government have given way to crazed despotism and the bloody mass-entertainment displays of the gladiatorial ring.

It is surely no coincidence that one of Gladiator's writers, John Logan, also wrote Oliver Stone's thuggish football movie Any Given Sunday. Both films, themselves crowd-pleasing spectacles of violence, offer a consciously wishful fantasy-ending in which the battered hero remembers the authentic values which have become degraded. He then heroically re-establishes them in the very arena where the corrupt regime - for Stone, it is television - most potently displays its power. The edge of desperation in all these films suggests the traumatic, trapped condition of the citizen of today's world, who has nowhere else to go and for whom the globe is like the bubble that repeatedly and inescapably swallows up Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner (a source, surely, for The Truman Show). And it is all too plausible to see the films themselves as swallowed up by the system they may be trying to criticise, reinserted into the industry of human interest and indiscriminate sensation (the "culture") that helps to distract the people of the globe from realising how they stand.

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See also eg: http://www.turnoffyourtv.com/