by JackRiddler » Mon Nov 26, 2018 1:19 pm
Hollywood is uncanny that way. All scenarios that actually happen get foreseen. I think guessing a possible country-country invasion is a lot less remarkable than what the Lone Gunmen pilot episode of March 2001 accomplished.
The propaganda content here is elsewhere:
Americans are well-meaning, rational people, interested in having a good life and a good time. Technological geniuses, but hopelessly naive. Social dopes. But the average guy is a good guy. A typical white guy, that would be a sex-obsessed engineer. Look, his sexy girlfriend is fending off his clumsy advances and leading him by his dick. Ha ha ha. Now a black guy, he will be very good, boisterous. Kind of dumb, but plucky in a pinch.
The system is good. A few bad apples exist, motivated by greed. They always lose in the end. Their function is basically to prove that, and to help the good guys self-actualize. There is no ideology or larger set of sinister interests at work.
Now other peoples, they are irrational and prone to fits of inexplicable mass violence. Arabs are the worst that way. Racially programmed for terrorism. Look: big fat women in veils with rocket launchers. Ha ha ha. Who knows why these people fight each other. It makes no sense. We are only coincidentally present. Just doing business, spreading technology and wealth around the world. We blow up a lot of things, but it's they that cause it. We don't even know why. What are we doing here? Why don't they love us? (This is a time when the question was more why don't they love us than why do they hate us.)
But they sure love our movies. Not this one, so much.
Don't let anyone tell you mass culture has declined. Nothing today is more stupid than the above trailer. (Gee, I wonder what happened to these guys' careers?) Nothing today is trying harder to make the audience stupid, or more effective at making them stupid, or assuming that they are more stupid, than this trailer. Nothing today is more propagandistic and nakedly ideological, or more in denial about that. ("Hey, it's just entertainment! Do you people think everything is political?!") Nothing today is more violent, even if in this trailer it looks like maybe all this shooting and exploding miraculously happens without any bloodshed or death. True that today, the visible bodycount would be in the thousands and the gore would be everywhere, that is a difference. But in the next shot the dead will be just as invisible. Making a preemptive comedy exonerating imperialism destroying the Middle East is already maximally violent.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.
To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.
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