FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

[JackRiddler]

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Sure yeah yeah spoilers.

Utopia is cinematically excellent and has a lot of clever scripting. My problem with it is that if we accept its premises -- everything we see or know about political doings is tightly controlled top-down propaganda run by a few cells of super-rich and spook conspirators; no one can be trusted -- and apply it to Utopia itself, its implicit message seems intentionally discouraging. It's hard to take it either as a straight rendering of a hidden, denied reality, or as a satire of the conspiracy milieu, and of course a commercial orientation would aim for that middle ground. But what if we take it literally and conclude, as the work itself would suggest, that Utopia itself must be part of the plot?

In the second season, the story of the principals devolves into a sitcom, a Global Conspiracy Seinfeld wherein each stays true to their by-then familiar individual schtick. They seem to be the only ones able to survive any given episode. Almost every newly introduced character is subjected to the same subplot before the episode is done: They discover something about the grand global conspiracy. Then, within minutes or seconds of screen-time, a battalion of the always-ready (if often themselves disposable), faceless, fully committed, straight-shooting assassins appears and murders the potential whistleblower by silencer-headshot (almost always with lots of awful gore) and then executes a full cover-up. Presumably without even knowing why they are doing this to unarmed civilians, since they're not supposed to know about the plot.

Minor recurring characters get the same treatment by the second or third time they appear. As soon as one of these decides it's finally time to turncoat on the main conspiracy, they usually have seconds before the omnipresent assassins appear to do them in. Brainmatter once again spatters the set. This becomes an exercise in teaching helplessness. I can see why the incorporation of many confirmed conspiracy plots, sometimes with the real names and people used, can get people pissed off who aren't just assisting long-ago coverups.

Meanwhile, any major character who appears to be an ally to the wacky Lone Gunmen Spinoff Crew will, shockingly, turn out to be one of T.H.E.M. The one grand plot has a firm grip on everything significant that happens. Things go wrong for them, but they always adapt the plot into an even more effective version. Everyone even potentially in their way is murdered with extreme prejudice or (less often) easily blackmailed into silence and/or utility, except for the lovable loopy bunch of comic-book readers we started the series with. The bad guys' primary assassin, a relentless, soulless, invincible mass-murderer of literally dozens of innocent people including a number of children on screen, is given a self-discovery arc and made into a quasi-lovable member of the wacky gang (who were mostly headed for the torture chambers at the end of the second season). The emotionally best-rendered and most plausible character (relatively speaking), meanwhile, converts out of reason and conviction to join Global Depopulation Inc., and is made its new CEO. Isn't this all kind of suspect?

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[Harvey]

NATO has murdered upward of five million people in the last twenty years under the full glare of the worlds media.

Israel is ethnically cleansing Palestine and has repeatedly demonstrated a commitment to erase not just the people but the history of Palestine, under the full glare of world media. All the while, every senior politician in British politics is a self declared Zionist and critics of Zionism are anti-Semites. The definition of anti-Semitism they have fashioned is inherently anti-Semitic, if Semitic has any meaning at all. The majority of Palestinians being Semitic in the actual sense of the meaning of the word Semitic.

We're entering a period of unprecedented warming and while acknowledged by serious media, they still sell advertising space to all the big oil companies (and Saudi) and they still babble about tourism and travel, consumerism and fuck knows what else.

The united Kingdom is now run by a cabal of shallow self serving eugenicists whose goal is to depopulate the planet but in a way which does not interrupt their interests.

My point is this, if you apply the same art critical standards to what's happening in the real world, in short order you would be forced to conclude that reality is in fact very bad fiction.

At no point in Utopia do any of the main characters mount any critique of what is happening to them. For example, when presented with the eugenics argument from the ruling elite point of view none of them retort:

"Sure but we're having this discussion in the context of self serving elites who've come to the realisation that their system of self enrichment has limits. When presented with those limits, their logic is not to embrace equality, but to kill off all existential threats to their continued self interest, even if that means most of the rest of humanity. At no point does power attempt to have any discussion with the rest of us, say, about having fewer children or merely buying less shit. At no point does power entertain the idea of using fewer resources, which they themselves are squandering at a furious rate. In other words, power is essentially arguing that the end of its own model of control is so unthinkable, that it is better that everyone else must die than they rethink or revise their own model."

In other words, we are exactly where we are. Rationality is always a narrow excuse but never a description of an holistic whole. Utopia sets out to examine what the word Utopia might actually mean when carried out by any ideology readily to hand. What more could it be than a description of the limits of the rational mind?

[JackRiddler]

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Yeah, why don't they ever say that?

Another blinking red light is that the target for the baddies' first grand experiment is Britain, when you know it would be a place in Africa or Latin America. I am certain (speaking unironically) that the echoes of 'white genocide' (given the majority demographics of Britain, still) are unintentional. I am almost as certain that the writers' choice of Britain was driven (consciously or otherwise) by the audience demographics for a British series.

As you say, NATO is a real-existing murder machine everywhere outside the homeland territories, and this isn't or barely touched.

The focus is on a minority segment of the global ruling class posited as eugenicist and fasco-ecologist (who exist, and are close to a singular obsession on this board), while the majority of the ruling classes, global or national, have remained growthist (because they're driven by immediate return? -- and for ideological reasons), and growthist has gone together with natalist, pro-fossil fuel, indifferent to ecology, and usually a tendency toward promotion of LCD nationalism (out of conviction, presumably, and to maintain sufficient popular legitimacy).

(Exceptions, to a degree: China. Developing past fossil fuels while simultaneously opening up hundreds of new coal mines. Obviously has not been natalist over several generations. But also the state most autonomous from the larger system.)

But yeah, my big problem with Utopia was, as I said, something that got extreme in the second season: every time someone other than the principals woke up to the grand plot, they had a minute of screen time left before a perfect headshot splattered their brains all over the screen. Beautiful cinematography and some excellent set pieces and monologues no longer made up for that.

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[Harvey]

Recent events have prompted me to mention a three part British television series ostensibly about ritual murders, organised crime and police corruption, Red Riding, In The Year of Our Lord. The three parts are sub-titled 1973, 1980 and 1983. Although, as with the more recent British television series Line of Duty, and as Jack has identified with the recently discussed Utopia, RR-ITYoOL it is not without problems.

In the case of Line of Duty the most recent series (6) was scheduled to air in early 2020 but was delayed by Covid in post production and aired in March 2021 instead. From this we can assume that the script was written and approved somewhere during early 2019 at the latest. What's interesting about this is the number of times that the phrase CHIS (Covert Human Intelligence Source) features in the first three or four episodes. It was shoe horned into almost every scene of the script (dozens of times) usually in the context of limited police powers to protect deep undercover police or police sources. For perspective, in series 5 (aired 2019) we see a deep undercover policeman carry out and commission a series of murders in his assumed role as an organised crime member, while trying to identify the ring leaders of the organised crime network, itself deeply infiltrated into the police force.

The aim of the Covert Human Intelligence Sources Bill appears to be to indemnify 'intelligence sources' employed by various arms of the state of any criminal liability, without limitation. A stunning co-incidence, I'm sure you'll agree.

In series six which aired from March 2021 (scheduled to air April 2020, I think) we are battered over the head with this phrase CHIS - Covert Human Intelligence Source. Here's the thing, just months before series 6 aired, back in October 2020, the Covert Human Intelligence Sources Bill was enacted by parliament. We can assume that the series was pre-propaganda (see TV series 24 in relation to torture and the war on terror) to smooth passage of and reaction to the CHIS Bill. In the event, the series was all but unnecessary after a year of fear driven propaganda regarding Covid19 (and also the Tory electoral victory of December 2019.) It was still quite surreal to encounter the blatent propaganda after the bill had already passed, but don't forget, from the perspective of early 2019 when the show was commissioned, it couldn't have been a sure thing that the Tories would have such a large majority in any future election.

Similarly, Red Riding isn't without such problems, reigning in many of the implications of its own premise in later episodes and ending with the Peter Sutcliffe 'Yorkshire Ripper' murders almost as an afterthought. That said, it's dark, gripping, very well made and certainly worth a view.

[drstrangelove]

[Harvey]

Since only a blank occurs here (UK - copyright issues) it's often helpful to include a title or description.

[drstrangelove]

I, Claudius.

1976 BBC adaption of the Robert Graves novel.

[Harvey]

Cheers.

[JackRiddler]

I want to be King! -- I want to be Pope!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY1Me-Oo84Q

drstrangelove, you can use the youtube button to insert the code as follows, copy-pasting the youtube identifier (the part after watch?v=) in between the tags. Also, you can add the full youtube link. (This also works for vimeo, if you see that button above the posting box.)

Code: Select all

[youtube]zY1Me-Oo84Q[/youtube]

[Harvey]

Nightwatching (2007) by Peter Greenaway is another discussion of art and power in film, this time through the forensic examination of Rembrandt's most famous painting Nightwatch, a fascinating enquiry into the image, the philosophy and art of Rembrandt himself and Greenaway's own ideas and obsessions. Greenaway suggests that the painting is an accusation against it's commissioners, the record of a conspiracy to murder and the subsequent cover-up. Along the way the film itself is a portrait of corruption, child prostitution, blackmail and intrigue. Beautiful, thought provoking and astonishingly enjoyable.





The film is complemented (or was conceived as a film in two parts) by Greenaways documentary, Rembrandt's J'accuse which I shall see tonight.

[Harvey]

A sort of art-house Mad Max made for all those who already live there and who are, co-incidentally, also among those least likely to see it: Nomadland is a film literally set after the end of 'Empire'. Low key, emotionally intelligent and very beautifully photographed, it is a film which will not live in memory, very much like life.

[Harvey]

After thirty years I thought it was time to revisit Bruce Robinson's How to Get Ahead In Advertising. If anything, far less over the top and far more enjoyable than I remembered. Bravo!

[Harvey]

Louis Malle's My Dinner With Andre (1981) seems to grow more relevant, not less.

[Harvey]

From my perspective Gwen (2018) is a perfectly accurate description of capitalism and associated organisational effects and makes it's point definitively. Whereas all the best things capitalism claimed were its own, were those things arising out of the very communitarianism which capitalism displaced. Beautiful photography too. I can attest to the accuracy of all the scenes of clouds billowing across the Welsh hills.





Bliss (2021) by contrast is at least an interesting addition to the Simulation Theory debate. By the sheer number of other films it evoked in quick succession without recreating a single moment of a single scene, I thought it was worth mentioning for that alone.*





*
The Matrix
The Swimmer
They Live
The City and the City (Based on the novel by China Miéville)
Dark City
Devs

[Harvey]

Season 3 of Britannia introduces some elements of the Roman 'Deep State' and continues to underscore the relevance of the story to our own time, but on the theme of that other five hundred year sequence of theft, conquest and slaughter (begining at almost exactly the moment Rome actually ends with Roman Byzantium (Constantinople) faltering in the mid 1400's) I'm also watching the four part documentary by Raoul Peck, Exterminate All the Brutes, courtesy of Fruhmenschen.



Western 'Civilisation' of the last five centuries is eminently comparable to the roughly five hundred year main sequence of Roman 'civilisation' and although Jack might jump in to point out that such comparisons are not helpful, serving only to trivialise the mass murder of ancient Rome, there's definitely something there...