I’ve labored to the top of this hill, and it’s taken half my life to get here and the other side slopes down. Today once again we’ll trust in the way heaven’s law compels but not always protects its human allies. Today he’ll teach me even more about the war between the self and the world, the self divided into the soul and body, the body usually acting as the traitor within the gates. He’ll lead me to that magic which we recognize in dreams that make the face of the sleeper relax.

There’s a lot of keen insights in this, but Zizek still lumps things together that are rightfully separated and draws what I see as rather nihilistic conclusions. To the first point, he rightly (in my view) castigates people who believe that the only thing wrong with voracious American consumption patterns is that they are not sustainable. We buy too much shit, and no matter how sustainable that becomes, real change won’t come until we have a more modest sense of what we’re entitled to, and dare I say it, a less materialistic view of what makes life meaningful. On the consumer side, buying green products is self-congratulatory and naive (in the sense that it won’t really solve anything), and on the producer side, it’s generally cynical. Zizek is on point with all this. But capitalism and consumerism aren’t the same thing. Consumerism is necessarily predicated on the accumulation of more stuff. This attitude, to the exclusion of other philosophies, and especially when coupled to what Americans are conditioned to expect out of their lives, is extraordinarily wasteful. Capitalism as such as not. It’s simply about generating value. That can come from material goods, but it can also come from services, and so long as the relations are governed by competition, if people are animated by a belief that not fucking up the environment is good, then there is an incentive to do that.

I’m not a starry-eyed fundamentalist of the Austrian school; I like capitalism, but a lot of the time it’s not so great. Capitalism American-style can often be characterized in the latter way. Despite that I’d still like to offer a modest defense of it. Nearly all of the decisions we make in the real world are selected from among imperfect solutions, rather than from a stark choice between “the right way” and “the wrong way.” The thing that in my view stands to do the most to stop illegal logging (and legal logging, for that matter) in Indonesia in the next 20 years is the tech industry. Kindles and iPads obviate the need for books. Much logging in Indonesia is done to secure raw materials for the paper industry. I truly believe we’ll be the last generation to really think of books as something other than a piece of furniture or a nichey vanity object, and it’s because of the explosive popularity of e-readers. Granted, this means that the exploitation of mineral resources will probably increase. But the net effect of that strikes me as less worse than the rampant clearcutting of forests, a problem that gets compounded once sprawl creeps over the former wilderness. This is a function of market operations, not of green crusading.

There’s nothing historically unique about the moral quandary we face when we buy products that we know contribute to global suffering or environmental degradation. The difference is that we recognize it, and often feel guilty about it. If you want to criticize people who buy wedding rings as villains because the jewelry they bought was smelted in a dirty foundry with raw materials acquired through slave labor, that’s perfectly legitimate, but realize that you’ll end up also condemning Russian peasants. By their very labor, they upheld the autocratic and brutal Tsardom. Steppe peoples were slaughtered, virgin forests were cut down, etc. Totally disengaging from society wasn’t a realistic solution then, and I don’t think it’s a solution now.

I don’t know what Zizek offers as a solution to the above problem, or to the more general problems of consumerism and the environment, but if I had to speculate on the basis of other stuff I’ve read by him, I’d expect that he believes a crisis will come and it’s the task of the agitators among us to take advantage of that to mold our perceptions in a radically new way. This new way, one would hope, would not be as fucked up. Zizek tends to be long on generalities and platitudes, but short on specifics. He’s a Marxist, after all, and if Marx (or any of his more modern keepers of the flame, like G. A. Cohen or whoever) had ever outlined specific solutions the 20th century would have been a bit different. It’s easy to criticize, and I’m glad he does. I just wish he offered something more constructive than a universal guilty verdict and a by-the-numbers Marxist solution like “Use the upcoming crisis of capitalism/whatever to institute a freer, juster regime.”

As far as solutions go, what I’d like to see is a new class of businessmen who believe in things other than enriching themselves. We carry our values with us everywhere, and we shouldn’t be expected to check them at the doors to a shareholder meeting. I think American capitalism would look very different if the idealists among us chose to create businesses that correspond to their ideals, rather than opting for a commune or a life as a wandering social critic.

There’s another more submerged issue here concerning how we think about nature. Again, I think Zizek is right when he (elsewhere, not in this video) characterizes our views of nature as sentimental and overly romantic. So long as we think that nature should be in a constant state of happy harmony and equilibrium, rather than one of instability occasionally punctuated by catastrophes, it’s going to be hard to stop fucking it up. We need to first think harder about what nature actually is, and then proceed from there to think about the ways in which we should preserve it and why. Zizek’s view of nature is closer to the truth in my view; it’s like the filmmaker Werner Herzog’s, but shorn of Herzog’s odd quasi-mysticism. It’s a place of, in Herzog’s words, “chaos, hostility and murder.” Attempts to make a forest conform to some Disneyfied paradigm of what nature is can be just as bad as burning the forest down, and maybe even worse.

Goats don't usually get this much to eat, but this one is high up in the Party.

The hermetically sealed theocracy-meets-Stalinist dictatorship of North Korea does not allow foreign reporters or filmmakers onto their territory. The state’s quasi-racist ideology shuns them – they might taint Korean purity. So, aside from the Chinese and Russian workers who necessarily do cross-border business, or the odd tourist from harmless countries like Switzerland, there are not many people who can talk about North Korea with the kind of first-hand experience that makes a documentary especially compelling. N. C. Heikin’s Kimjongilia skirts around those foreign middlemen and goes directly to the source: North Korean refugees who have successfully made it to South Korea. Their stories, told through filmed interviews, are harrowing, horrifying, and rarely have a happy ending.

The film, which takes its name from a flower named in honor of the Dear Leader, is built primarily around these interviews. And Heikin has chosen well: the interviewees represent a broad cross-section of North Korean society. Some, like a concert pianist and a highish-ranking military officer, come from privileged (relatively speaking) backgrounds. Others toiled away in squalid conditions as farmers. What these subjects have in common is their fate: most ended up in the system of concentration camps that crisscrosses North Korea. One unlucky soul was even born in a camp. For anyone who has read literature by authors who survived the Holocaust or the gulag system in the USSR, the picture that emerges will seem familiar. Life is, for the most part, tightly regimented, with a few little pockets of freedom. Creativity is extinguished.  The system as a whole forces people to exploit one another to survive. This is ugly but necessary viewing.

Heiken is to be commended for capturing the little details that convey some essential element of his interviewee’s humanity. The way the military officer, though controlled in his speech, wears an intense and angry look on his face when he talks about the government. The that the man born in the concentration camp tents his hands over and over while he talks – maybe to hide a mutilated finger, maybe because it’s a deeply-ingrained gesture of submission, maybe for no reason at all. The way the voice of the woman who was sold into sexual slavery in China for 5 years remains steady, even when she discusses her risky escape. With some interviewees, the camera begins with a closeup on the eye before moving down to the mouth. Such artifice can be distracting and annoying when employed too often (see the first season Errol Morris’s documentary series First Person for a perfect example of this), but here its used sparingly enough that it retains its effectiveness. (It occurred to me later that it may also be a device to obscure the identity of some of the interviewees; elsewhere the director drenches them in shadow à la Unsolved Mysteries.) It is not hard to persuade an audience that Kim Jong-Il’s government is one of the most, if not the most, repugnant governments presently in existence. The difficult task is to put a human face on what that means without overwhelming the viewer. Heiken handles this task well.

Dogs in the Worker's Paradise do not wear such decadent garments.

This also comes in part from the film’s beautiful complementary visuals. Sometimes they are ironic. There are a lot of clips from the preposterous melodramas and propaganda films produced by the North Korean government, and Heiken juxtaposes them with the stark reality that the scene in question is attempting to whitewash. Other times, the complementary visuals amplify a mood. There are abstract scenes cut into the film featuring a dancer dressed in the iconic uniform of the female cops that direct Pyongyang’s non-existent traffic. These sequences are mesmerizing. The dancer’s jerky and increasingly tortured movements visually reinforce the tremendous struggles of many of the interviewees. These sequences are also, therefore, sometimes hard to watch. But they never go on so long that they steal attention from the interviewees or distract the viewer.

Films like Kimjongilia necessarily require potted histories and other types of expository storytelling. Rather than the somber wall of text approach, Heiken livens up these necessary presentations with kinetic text, images and short film clips. This can go horribly wrong, as in Robert Barry Ptolemy’s dreadful Transcendent Man, but here they work well. The visuals are well composed and attractive without being flashy. This again is a fine line, and Heiken walks it well. These visual components share a lot in common with some iconic opening and closing credits sequences that people have come to appreciate in their own right.

If you are already familiar with North Korea and the horrific way of life its citizens “enjoy,” Kimjongilia will not tell you anything you did not already know. There are no stunning revelations or insights. What it offers is perhaps more important than that, though. Anyone can marshal statistics and data to convince an audience of one thing or another, but without a human face, the effect remains effervescent. By contrast, the interviewees in this film leave an indelible impression. You may have known the North Korean government was cruel, but not this cruel. Kimjongilia is not always an easy watch, but to restrict one’s viewing to only what is easy is to close one’s self off from the true emotional power cinema can have.

Playing dress up is fun.

Nothing can provide as much intellectual security as the conviction that one’s position is not only factually warranted but morally imperative. This position is evident in the writings of activist (I hesitate to actually confer on him the honor of being referred to as a “scholar”) Ward Churchill. His “history” is more polemic than anything and frequently cast in extremely Manichean terms. But the most insidious part of Churchill’s work is not the sanctimonious presentism that pervades his scholarship, but the extreme “ends justify the means” mentality that leads him to conclude that innocent people deserve to die – and the cover of legitimacy his reputation as a professor lends to that position.

Churchill gained notoriety outside activist/cultural studies circles in 2001 when he wrote an essay immediately after the terrorist attacks in September called Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens. In that essay he recites a litany of supposed crimes by the United States, either against Iraq specifically or in defiance of international law more generally, some of which are correct and some of which aren’t. The important thing about the essay, though, is less the facts that he cites in it, but more the conclusion that he draws; namely, that the military/civilian divide should not exist. The people who worked in the World Trade Center, because they ultimately abetted the spread and maintenance of a global capitalist system that Churchill perceives to be oppressive, are thus collaborative and guilty “little Eichmanns” deserving of their fates.

Pure evil, according to Zerzan.

The Eichmann comment and the whole notion that doing anything except totally disengaging from modern society makes you the moral equivalent of a murderer stems from the philosopher John Zerzan and his respective understanding – I’d call it misuse – of Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil” outlined in the 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Zerzan believes that the domestication of animals is wrong. Reading something like that, you might make the mistake of believing that he’s a fervent animal rights supporter. No, he just opposes agriculture. Seriously. Along with basically every other part of civilization. Basically, Zerzan makes the Luddites look like Steve Jobs. Churchill’s politics are not as insane as Zerzan’s (not even close), but their similar understanding of Arendt’s work is extremely distorted.

Arendt’s book revolves around her observations at the 1961 trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi officer who had coordinated the holocaust. Arendt expected, along with most other observers, to find in Eichmann someone like Julius Streicher: a frothing at the mouth anti-Semite hell-bent on a pure German race. What she found instead was a relatively colorless bureaucrat who had abdicated all sense of moral responsibility and in the process facilitated one of the most horrific crimes in human history. Even in oppressive, totalitarian societies people can still resist policies like the ones that the Nazis sought to implement, but Eichmann, like most Nazis, chose instead to collaborate in their implementation. Arendt’s overall point was that people who are not evil can wind up doing extraordinarily evil things.

But the society Arendt was talking about was not the United States, it was an ideologically motivated totalitarian society with extensive mass mobilization of the citizenry that ultimately sought to completely annihilate entire groups based on their religion, race, sexual orientation, and political affiliation. True, the United States’ sanctions on Iraq killed innocent people. But that is something entirely different from an effort to wipe every Iraqi off the face of the Earth. And Saddam Hussein, after all, could have diverted at least a little bit of money from his crappy army to feed people had he wanted to, but he didn’t. The holocaust and Iraqi sanctions are difficult in degree and type, and the way the guilt is distributed is much more complex. But one need not resort to this kind of morbid calculus to identify the most enormous error in Churchill’s thinking. Eichmann, after all, was in the military, and was actually in charge of coordinating the holocaust. He was not an ill-defined cog in a massive system that does much, much, much more than simply abet killing people. Blogger zombietime, in his coverage of Churchill speaking at an anarchist book fair in the San Francisco area, summed up Churchill’s conclusion fairly well: “People with jobs are not humans.” He continues:

One wonders what Hannah Arendt would have thought if she knew that one day her study of Eichmann would be used to dehumanize an entire nation of people — which is exactly what Churchill did here when he said that “going with the program” (i.e. participating in society by, for example, having a job) “voids your humanity.”

Indeed. Churchill, because of the controversy ignited by his essay, was the subject of what may have been a politically motivated investigation by his employers at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Politically motivated or not, the investigation did find that he had committed what I would characterize as very, very serious instances of academic misconduct and that he had also lied about his own personal history on his job application. So while he may have been victimized for speaking his mind, it probably would have helped his case if he had not been a plagiarizer and a fraud.

I’m reminded in some ways of Bill Moyers’ interview with Judge Richard Goldstone. Goldstone’s view was that even though Israel was the subject of inordinate attention and harassment by the United Nations Human Rights Council, if serious crimes were committed during the course of the Israeli war in Gaza, they should still be investigated regardless. That the investigation itself was the result of an evident and persistent bias in the Council should not mean that Israel gets a free pass when it actually does commit crimes. Such is how I feel about Churchill. If, ultimately, the University of Colorado did single out Churchill for political reasons I’ll be ready to condemn that, but at the moment I’m only ready to condemn them for not holding up Churchill, or indeed all its scholars, to the same level of academic rigor that it did most recently.

In the inter-war period, an American communist organizer decided for some reason to open his speech with the above. It’s a line so preposterous that if someone told me the speaker was actually a free market fundamentalist in disguise out to make Communism look ridiculous, I would have no trouble believing them. Such is the stuff of this post. Although Poe’s Law was postulated in reference to fundamentalist Christianity, its applications elsewhere are legion. Roughly, Poe’s Law holds that extremism and parodies of extremism are indistinguishable. The tanned, thickly-accented Guidismo of the inhabitants of MTV’s Jersey Shore and the sheltered, fact defying logic and beliefs of the Marxist-inspired extreme left fit the bill perfectly.

I had heard that Jersey Shore is a show best watched with enormous quantities of alcohol; with rational thinking intact, one might be liable to ask why people like this exist, how people like this manage to live free from scorn, and other existential questions that can only serve to frustrate and provoke Guido-like violence. So, brain wrapped in a warm cocoon of gin, I subjected myself to it. The premise of the show revolves around a group of Guidos and Guidettes living in a beach house on the Jersey Shore (apparently the Mecca of all things Guido) and going to clubs, working, working out, getting tan, and getting fucked up. MTV really went out of its way to find the most archetypal Guidos: though not all of them have hideous Brooklyn Fades as I had hoped, the things they do are pure Guido. Things like referring to oneself in the third person as “The Situation.” Things like pulling up one’s shirt to reveal six pack abs. Things like being obsessed with one’s Italian heritage despite being about as authentically Italian as a Pizza Hut. And, of course, things like fighting, hooking up with tanned Guidettes (themselves fairly hilarious, but nothing next to the fine male specimens the show’s producers picked out), drinking tons of protein shakes and applying dangerous amounts of product to their hair. In sum, the show’s cast look and act how one would look if they went as a Guido for Halloween.

At the same time, Jersey Shore gives me reason to believe that MTV is not, in fact, the massive black octopus slowly suffocating our culture and values that I once considered it. In almost all of their reality programming, MTV focuses on degenerate dead-enders that even the most deluded and vacuous teenager would have difficulty admiring. Perhaps the executives in charge, in order to atone for years of Jackass, now choose the most outlandishly horrific people to base series around as a means of critiquing our worst excesses. Jersey Shore specifically and MTV generally have become America’s most trenchant cultural critics. We look into the mirror provided by MTV and are confronted with all the excess and idiocy that our culture can provide.  Sometimes it’s revolting, other times it’s enthralling, but at all times it really makes you think about just how Pauly D, Snooki and indeed all of us have fallen from the American dream. At the same time, though, the people in Jersey Shore’s reliance on – and celebration of – all the fruits of our capitalist society to such absurd degrees is part of what makes them appear so ridiculous. Whatever authentic identities they may have had is lost under layers of spray-on tan and whey protein-fueled muscles. Capitalism paradoxically helped create the problem and points towards a solution – but it’s difficult to escape the notion that we wouldn’t be cursed with people like these living next to us if it were not for capitalism to begin with.

Or maybe that’s how I would have felt if I could actually understand anything that the bloggers and commenters on the Maoist-Thirdworldist-Whateverist blog Monkey Smashes Heaven were saying. Near as I can tell, they have taken the Maoist concept of people’s war – peasants encircling the cities and taking over, some other stuff, communist utopia – and applied it on a global scale, where the first world is the city and the third world is the peasant or village or whatever. Most of the rest of what’s being said is so incomprehensible and arcane it was lost on me. What wasn’t lost on me was the irony that is people who probably live in the first world blogging about how the first world needs to be destroyed on fucking wordpress. You have really never seen a flame war until you’ve seen a flame war between the denizens of the extreme Marxist left. Where else could you come across such priceless gems:

Bad-jacketing is itself pig work: it obviously serves the imperial state. But of course serving the imperial state is exactly what Davidson does, despite his pretense of being a “communist.” As was mentioned above, he openly kkkollaborates with Obomba or the Dumbokkkratic Party. What sort of “communist” buys into the U$ empire?

Well, it’s finally happened. Two of the most frequent and egregious molesters of the English language – Marxists with stilted, jargony prose and the sophomoric, name-calling American grassroots political activist – have met, had passionate sex, and birthed the Marxist blogger.

Some of their positions are so bizarre it’s difficult to believe they are serious. They defend, for instance, Professor Ward Churchill’s right to free speech that has supposedly been infringed, but cheer when tinpot third world dictators crush dissent within their own borders. For the bloggers at MSH, the senseless murder of dissenters or suppression of free speech is not inherently wrong, it’s just wrong when the first world does it. How exactly they arrive at that conclusion escapes me, but the answer is surely somewhere in some text written by Mao Zedong, who they invoke religiously in every debate. It’s tempting to believe that some of the bloggers are actually just pulling elaborate jokes on the readers – provided that one is sufficiently familiar with the arcane post-Marxist theory that they are talking about, it wouldn’t be difficult to pull off. And how are we supposed to take pictures like these seriously? But near as I can tell, they are serious. Thankfully, adherents to their weird ideology will probably never surpass an amount that can be counted on two hands, but as with Guidos, it’s still somewhat disturbing to know that actual people like these exist.

I seriously doubt any Guidos or renegade Maoists will find this post. If some do, then I expect to be called either a hater or a crypto-Trotskyist bourgeoisie wrecker. And those are appellations I’d wear proudly. In an era in which it’s becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate reality from non-reality, it’s not like those labels mean anything anyway. I’m not even sure they ever did.

America, meet your sexiest new star.

Where to begin. “The Box” doesn’t really make any sense, the acting is inconsistent (with the notable exception of Frank Langella), the score is abominable and Richard Kelly doesn’t seem to understand how unintentionally funny some of the images he puts on the screen are. That being said, there’s a certain charm to such a ridiculous movie taking itself so seriously. And underneath the silliness, it does seem like Kelly has important things to say. He’s just not sure how to say them with his chosen medium.

“The Box” stars Cameron Diaz, James Marsden and most of Frank Langella and is very loosely based on a short story titled “Button, Button” by Richard Matheson. Matheson was an experienced writer of print and screen who wrote many of the old episodes of The Twilight Zone, and the original plot reflects the same kind of sensibilities (it was also turned into an episode of The Twilight Zone during the brief 1980s revival). The basic story is that a couple in financial straits receives a box with a button on it. The mysterious man who gives them the box tells them that if they press the button, they will receive a million dollars, but someone they don’t know will die. Predictably, they press it. The mysterious man gives them the money and departs telling them that he’s off to give the box to somebody else – and he’s sure it will be someone that they don’t know! It’s a formulaic and fun short story in the tradition of O. Henry and it features a great twist, but it is not something that could be turned into a 2 hour movie. Realizing this, Kelly gets the original plot out of the way in the first half hour and uses the rest of his film to ponder deeper box-related questions: how the box works, why the guy with the box keeps going around giving it to people, who the guy is, and so on. Guess what Kelly’s answers are! Seriously, just guess. Even after watching the film I’m not sure, but they involve lightning, the NSA, the Viking program, weird looking water and aliens or god or something. Kelly’s answers are often as surprising as they are nonsensical.

Beyond the original box story, I’m still not sure I quite get what was going on this film. The film, too, does not even seem to be sure of what is going on, or even really care. In light of this apparent approach to film making, it would be easy to dismiss Kelly as a lousy second pressing of David Lynch; after all, they both deploy a set of idiosyncratic tropes in the framework of an abstruse story in service of some “greater message” that challenges the audience. But Kelly differs from Lynch in that he appears to actually want to do something more than just challenge the audience. The incoherence in the story comes off less as a Lynchian cinematic pretension and more as a simple failure to effectively communicate his ideas. With The Box, I believe Kelly tries to suggest something about free will, determinism and the nature of redemption. He just needs a better editor to bring that out of the jumble that he presents the audience with. More importantly, he also needs to find a better person or group to score the film than the members of Arcade Fire, an otherwise very talented band that composes a truly awful score.

The serious tone that Kelly cultivates throughout the film is constantly undermined by its bombastic and melodramatic score. Taken alone, the score sounds alternately like the soundtrack to a soap opera or a lost Tchaikovsky composition; as a part of this film, it intrudes on and ruins nearly every scene. The only meaningful purpose I could figure for having such a hamfisted score is that Kelly intended it to function sort of like a laugh track. Without hearing sad and mournful strings wailing away in the background, the average moviegoer would probably be confused by the sight of Cameron Diaz’s deformed foot (”Is this supposed to be arty? Creepy? Oh, there’s the sad music, I’m supposed to feel sorry for her!”). Worried, perhaps, that his metaphysical mumbo jumbo and scatterbrained plot would leave audiences confused and unsure how to interpret various scenes, Kelly beats the viewer over the head with the musical equivalent of a sledgehammer just to make sure that we “get” it.

I walked out of the theater unsure of whether I liked this movie or not. Perhaps that’s not even the right way of looking at it. The plot was certainly muddled and at times outright preposterous, but ultimately more satisfying than watching some David Lynch monstrosity where you slog through 2 hours of “provocative” imagery to find out that the secret behind the film is that some guy bought a bag of chips at a gas station in Beverly Hills – and that that “symbolizes something.” The Box, though it does occasionally entertain, is worthwhile moreso because of the issues that it prompts the audience to contemplate. There is indeed something meaningful in the core of this film, though it might not be quite as profound as maybe Kelly thinks it is. I’m just not sure whether the privilege of considering that something is worth the 9 dollars admission. It is a decent effort, and irrespective of its many flaws, it holds the audience’s attention. When an extremely ambitious film fails, it at least fails while trying something new and original. And that’s more than can be said of most movies from large Hollywood studios.

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