arrest this man, he talks in maths, he buzzes like a fridge

[intertribal]

Well, I just wasted $1.50 of my money and 2 hours of my life watching this 2002 Matrix-wannabe movie "Equilibrium".  I now know that just because a movie has Christian Bale in it, does not ensure its quality.  It follows one of the sci-fi plots:

* in the post-apocalyptic future, the dictatorship-control-freak-government has decided that people would be better off without emotions or art.  So they declare all books and paintings contraband and all people who feel anything "sense-offenders", making everyone automatons, chained to the news announcements from their Paterfamilias and their curfews and authorizations.  The entire world is made of gray skyscrapers.  No one seems to eat.  Everyone wears black and walks around unsmiling.  Someone who was once on the side of the evil government decides to become a revolutionary after hearing classical music and brings down the government through, what else, violence. 

Once you've seen this once, you really have seen it a million times: "V for Vendetta", "1984", "The Matrix", "Minority Report", "Gattaca", Fahrenheit 451.  It's so easy to make stories like this.  The moral of the story is that art is wonderful, and control and the government are evil, and individuality is great, and it's fun to be a revolutionary, you get to kill lots of people.  So people make many stories like this.  I mean, at this point we'll be so concerned about this future that when the future turns out to be an invasion of human-eating bugs, everybody's going to be blindsided.

Here are some futuristic sci-fi movies whose futures do not revolve around the same tired bleak, sterile, "perfect but actually horrifically flawed" metropolis:

* "The Fifth Element" - the movie itself was trash, but at least there were colors, and there was dirt. 
* "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence" - a great movie with mindblowing imagery, and here there are still masses of poor people who like to watch things get destroyed.
* "Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence" - again, a metropolis that doesn't forget that corporations still have to earn money
* "Akira" - see above.  This movie's post-apocalyptic Neo Tokyo is very convincing - drugs, neon signs, political coups, tricked out bikes.
* "Tank Girl" - who the fuck understands or takes this movie seriously, but it takes place in a desert and involves tanks.

Because seriously.  A thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters, given a minute, will reproduce movies like "Equilibrium".  They may be loved by the young and impressionable who think they're being ground-breaking, but they say nothing new.  Dictatorships are bad.  Freedom is good.  Violence to revolt from one and earn the former.  And we wonder why, in spite of us always rooting for freedom fighters in movies like this, we continue to vote in politicians like Bush?  The military-industrial complex that is Hollywood laughs as it churns out these projects.

Comments

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

And I agree that insofar as something like the UN can change norms, that is probably the most important factor in political change; I just also think that change seems apparent more often than it is. Much as people on the west coast think their gender relations are better than in the midwest, but I see those wonderful, liberal, feminist men doing the same damn things that the godfearing, conservative, frat boys do, with different reasoning, and it's sad. And it does have the potential for change...maybe even some real change has occurred, but...much less than they think, and sometimes it's the thinking that this wonderful change has happened that bothers me, because then people refuse to see what's wrong...

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Sorry all my thinking is all sorts of socio-cultural. It happens. Our language & politics unit is race and gender right now ("language: weapon of the strong" which came after "language: weapon of the weak?"), and we're reading about pornography when I get back, so that's probably where my focus is....

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

It's all good. I actually oddly think that the US has changed less than other countries... like Indonesia, the only country I know... have, and I think that may be because Indonesia's such a young country in comparison - we really did only start being a unified nation in 1945. So maybe some things in the US have settled and it's much harder to change them now. I do think that things are better for women now in the U.S., but not for minorities, not unless they're rich. But I'm not a women's studies person, so...

it's true what you're saying about the overall structure being the same despite a "change". But the argument in norm theory, in poli sci, is that even if people feel the need to lie to cover up the same shit that before they were doing out in the open, that's still a change. Like, yes, you have a constitution, but you don't really follow it - but at least you show that having a constitution is the norm/ideal/standard, and the hope is that from there people will try to hold you accountable to the promises you made, even if they were just cover-ups you never intended to follow through on. The hope is also that the people of the country will start to believe the norm and it will become engrained in society, and then you won't have the whole doublespeak thing going on.

However, an important corollary: some norms are deeper than others, and thus some changes are harder than others. Particularly if they involve things like breaking cultural and/or religious tradition in order to adhere to universal liberal principles. And I think some norms might just not change. Like this woman Charli Carpenter wrote about the norm of saving "women and children first" and thus leaving the men to die, in the Balkans, even though men are more likely to be killed than women (but women are of course more likely to be raped). And I wrote in my memo that she writes about this norm as if it is very deeply engrained at all levels of the hierarchy, and I think it's very old too, and so you have to wonder if it's something that came inherent with a patriarchal civilization and that probably won't change unless the entire civilization gets blown to bits and you start from scratch. OR if it's something biological, though I tend to blame civilization before biology.