The Means of Escape

The communists in the Coen brothers’ Hail Caesar! are silly caricatures, but the film upholds basic Marxist premises.

 by Eileen Jones

The new Coen brothers’ film Hail Caesar! has been promoted as wacky, lighthearted entertainment about Hollywood in the 1950s, with many critics praising it in those terms; Lou Lumenek of the New York Post calls it “an enjoyable lark,” for example, while Peter Rainer of Christian Science Monitor says it’s “a doodle in the Coen canon.”

These misleading characterizations may explain why the film kicked off so badly. Though by this point it’s made enough to cover its budget, in the United States it had “the lowest opening haul of any major release in the Oscar-winning duo’s career.”

Hail Caesar! has a lot of hilarious and delightful bits — especially if you know anything about the history of Hollywood’s classic studio era — but it’s far too dense and intricate a film for general audiences who were sold on a zany slapstick comedy featuring George Clooney as a clueless 1950s movie star pitching face-forward out of his trailer like a felled tree.

The film has miserable audience ratings. I’ve seen it twice now in fairly crowded theaters; people laugh freely at the early scenes but sink into the doldrums about a quarter of the way into the film. In fact, the moment when audiences decide they hate the film is even identifiable: it’s the scene where a roomful of communists, including a character identified as Dr Herbert Marcuse, starts holding forth on “the dialectic.”

Summer Anti-reviews 2015 (late)

Ant-Man: Unemployed ex-con has no future except as pawn of rich scientist fighting other rich scientist. Man as the ant of capital.

Straight Outta Compton: Black class war mediated through white capital excites and confuses everyone; rise of the fuck-the-police theory of resistance. Women invisible.

Mad Max: Fury Road: Anthropocenic Feminism meets anti-primitivst techno vision of revolution in which the masters stones destroy the  masters house. Dystopia as simplified extreme capitalism: Capital/State controls key resources, workers as radicalized slaves/laborers who ‘freely’ sell their labor for commodity/water. Most suffer without health care. Woman as pure reproductive labor; brides and breeders. Max and Furiosa as atypical anti-identitarian Individuals against the state and capital. Vuvalini as communist holdout away from center of power; but doesn’t last. Need to take the center. Worship of Auto, religion of speed, metal, tech, power, engines, gas: control of space, territory, land, geography, climate. Alternatively, YPG vs. ISIS. 

Avengers Age of Ultron: Fear of the Coming Singularity: robots making robots, elimination of human labor from its own reproduction. Whats the need for humans, police anyways?  Goal of Avengers: self-abolition through creation of artificially intelligent ‘shield’ ‘bouncer’ on earth. Globalization of War: Eastern European ex-communist, american bombed country, East Asian science and genetics, East African mining warlord for precious metals. Ultron as reflection of capitalist own dream of perfect peace through competition: self-destruction of humanity. Avengers as america: individuals with dark pasts trying to avenge their own mistakes, creating more. Twins: results of war, experiments, communism, capitalism—psycho kids of next generation, just want to see it all burn. Taking former communist city, raising it up with mining technology, and dropping it back down to earth as meteor of ‘natural’ destruction. Fear of climate change so high, that its better to just do it ourselves, and evolve.

Jurassic World: nature as presupposition and result; Two kinds of nature: weaponized nature and spectacular nature; genetic modification of nature, our children, destroys all; siblings as hell; dinosaur as terrorist; can only kill, not domesticate.  

Ex Machina:   Wittengsteinian turing test for artifical intelligence as test of sexual intelligence; creation of AI as man’s attempt to create fantasy woman. 

Terminator: Genysis Can’t avoid the future apocalype, only hope is changing the past narrative of why. 

Missions Impossible 5: Rogue Nation: conservative critique of structural transformation; blame yourself not the system; american movie franchise vs james bond: myth of global conspiracy coordinating crises and accidents; horror of their meaningless is too much swallow; not enemies against us but our own attempts to preempt enemies for ever turning bad and attacking us (autoimmune)

Kingsman Secret Service: working class revenge story against other working class blokes by means of full state backing.

Man from U.N.C.L.E Revisionist nostalgia for the cold war.

The Decay of Cinema

  

SUSAN SONTAG

inema’s 100 years seem to have the shape of a life cycle: an inevitable birth, the steady accumulation of glories and the onset in the last decade of an ignominious, irreversible decline. It’s not that you can’t look forward anymore to new films that you can admire. But such films not only have to be exceptions — that’s true of great achievements in any art. They have to be actual violations of the norms and practices that now govern movie making everywhere in the capitalist and would-be capitalist world — which is to say, everywhere. And ordinary films, films made purely for entertainment (that is, commercial) purposes, are astonishingly witless; the vast majority fail resoundingly to appeal to their cynically targeted audiences. While the point of a great film is now, more than ever, to be a one-of-a-kind achievement, the commercial cinema has settled for a policy of bloated, derivative film-making, a brazen combinatory or recombinatory art, in the hope of reproducing past successes. Cinema, once heralded as the art of the 20th century, seems now, as the century closes numerically, to be a decadent art.

Perhaps it is not cinema that has ended but only cinephilia — the name of the very specific kind of love that cinema inspired. Each art breeds its fanatics. The love that cinema inspired, however, was special. It was born of the conviction that cinema was an art unlike any other: quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral — all at the same time. Cinema had apostles. (It was like religion.) Cinema was a crusade. For cinephiles, the movies encapsulated everything. Cinema was both the book of art and the book of life.

As many people have noted, the start of movie making a hundred years ago was, conveniently, a double start. In roughly the year 1895, two kinds of films were made, two modes of what cinema could be seemed to emerge: cinema as the transcription of real unstaged life (the Lumiere brothers) and cinema as invention, artifice, illusion, fantasy (Melies). But this is not a true opposition. The whole point is that, for those first audiences, the very transcription of the most banal reality — the Lumiere brothers filming “The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station” — was a fantastic experience. Cinema began in wonder, the wonder that reality can be transcribed with such immediacy. All of cinema is an attempt to perpetuate and to reinvent that sense of wonder.

Can Marxist theory predict the end of Game of Thrones?

The elite are in trouble, their sources of wealth exhausted, their civilisation assailed by crazed fanatics from without – while, within, the masses are in open revolt. No, it’s not the eurozone – it is Westeros, the mythical venue for Game of Thrones.

It was JRR Tolkien, the father of fantasy fiction, who summed up the attraction of a genre that has become, in the past 60 years, a staple of modern culture: “a Secondary World into which both the designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside”.

But why do so many of these secondary worlds resemble feudalism in crisis? From Tolkien and CS Lewis, through to interstellar worldbuilders like Frank Herbert in Dune, and now Game of Thrones itself, the most successful fantasy worlds invoke not just the trappings of feudalism – kings, torture and trial by combat – but the actual crisis of feudalism.

In modern fantasy fiction there is always a crisis of the system: both of the economic order and of the auras of power – the magic– that emanate from it. There is, in literary theory, even a technical term for this critical point: “thinning”. In their Encyclopaedia of Fantasy, John Clute and John Grant define thinning as “the constant threat of decline”, accompanied by a pervasive mourning and sense of wrongness in the world.

As Westeros girds its gym-toned and wax-depilated loins for season five, the thinning process is well under way. There is the encroachment of the spirit world from the icy north; there is a slave revolt happening across the sea.

But there is also more clearly systemic doom hanging over the economy of Westeros. The ruling Lannister family obtained its wealth from owning most of the gold mines. The currency of Westeros is tri-metallic: there are gold, silver and copper coins deriving their value from the metal contained in them – not from a central bank and its “promise to pay” as in real life.

The problem is, in season four, the Lannisters’ big cheese, Tywin, dropped a bombshell: the gold mines have not produced for three years. On top of that, the Lannisters owe loads of money to something called the Iron Bank. “All of us live in its shadow,” says Tywin, “but none of us know it. You can’t run from them, you can’t cheat them and you can’t sway them with excuses. If you owe them money, and you don’t want to crumble, you pay it back.”

If this sounds a lot like Greece and the European Central Bank, that’s only because their current standoff replicates the essential power shift that happened towards the end of feudalism: debts accumulated under a corrupt patronage system, whose sources of wealth dried up, destroyed the system in the end.