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]

I dunno, that's why I love anthro (and its theory--yeah, yeah...). I feel like it explains things like "why we continue to vote in politicians like Bush" and what violence does and what things people believe that keep them subjugated...and maybe it's a naive hope, because I often think that nothing can change, but maybe then I can understand how it would be possible (change), and how to make it come about. I'm suspicious of politics, because I think that the systems, the institutions, the ideologies they perpetuate themselves have to change before the people in power would do anything different... and that's a lot to ask from a government. It's even too much to ask of a revolution, probably. And so then I give up and think that nothing will ever change. But maybe I only think that because I haven't lived long enough to see any real changes occur, I don't know. Or to see things get better instead of worse. Bleeh. So basically, I hope that understanding these things and doing what I love could someday help more than just me, that I can do more than be just another professor inspiring students who'll grow up to do the same thing--not that I don't value teaching, because I am learning that it is valuable, I just don't want that to be all I can do. But it's like this insane, naive little hope that I have, and maybe it'll never amount to anything. Probably not. But hey, it makes me feel like less of a nihilist, because nihilism sucks. I'll probably just succumb to the norms of the institution and do my ethnographic fieldwork and fall in love and get married and come back and teach. God, I hope not. Siiigh.

But I really love V for Vendetta in a way I don't love the others...maybe it's the sense of knowing that the news and the government are lying and not caring, because your life is just fine anyway, you've got your wife and kids and blah blah blah. It's the apathy, and the idea that someone could shake that from the middle class....ah, well. A fire just waiting for fuel (ani difranco song).

But yeah, equilibrium sucks.

So, uhh...yeah, I'm never going to change shit, but I'll die ranting about it, I guess. And by the end, I'll be "qualified" to do that, legitimate because I have my authority-granting doctorate....but probably only within the academic elite. Steve seems bent on making the academic elite not an elite anymore, but I'm not sure how he's going to manage that. Indoctrinate us all to do his bidding? Hahaha...