Film as Hazardous Propaganda
by Tibor R. Machan
As a regular viewer of Sundance films, mostly to satisfy my need for cultural anthropology lessons and because I do like some aspects of what they offer, I caught, just the other day, Jonathan Nossiter's "Signs & Wonders." The movie is about an American adulterer in Athens whose wife hooks up with a really angry, anti-American zealot. The zealot is, of course, depicted as a hero since he hates globalization, was a part of the Leftist resistance to the Greek dictatorship that the U.S. Government supported, and knows in his heart that he is absolutely right and expresses this in every move of his body.
Nossiter himself, of course, shares the hero's sentiments. In an interview he did shortly after the movie came out, Nossiter makes his views plain: "The film tries to look at what is the personal, intimate dimension to larger political concerns," he explains. "For instance, the terrible price of homogenization [and the] globalization of environments. It's not just that things start to look ugly and look the same and look like advertising and everyone can go and live their lives naturally. There's a natural emotional and psychological consequence in people's intimate lives. If you're a 15-year-old kid and you're starting a romance with someone, and you're doing it in a public park or you're doing it even in a diner from the '50s, that has a certain quality and environment to it. You're going to be able to express those first little longings of love and tenderness in a certain way. If you're sitting in a mall in a McDonald's eating toxic food in a toxic environment how do you start to express those first longings of love? I think there's a direct relationship between the environment and our inner lives." Oh, give me a break - who says?
It is famously in vogue now to depict former supporters of Leftist movements as heroes and show absolutely no mercy for those, like many Americans back in the 50s, who chose to take the lesser of two evils between right-wing fascist regimes and the communist alternative the "resistance" favored. Yes, yes, some of these resistance people were duped and had no great, self-conscious love for communism. But what about their utter naiveté?
This naiveté persists as these folks keep belly-aching about globalization and the alleged imperialism of McDonald and Pizza Hut. As Tyler Cowan shows, however, in his recent book Creative Destruction (Princeton UP, 2003), the alleged damage of American hegemony is in fact no damage at all. Mixing cultures is an ancient tradition and there simply are no pure cultures at all, given that human beings have always taken great delight in reinventing themselves and leaving traditions behind while mixed their elements and producing new ones. Sure, some of the creations of past generations of people will have to be purged so as to make room for what is novel and, quite often, safer and sounder than what was before. Such is life and to oppose it seems to me more of a mindless nostalgia than any concern for human flourishing.
In the case of Nossiter and Co., this exploitation of nostalgia of the mindless veneration of the past serves the insidious purpose of denigrating the United States of America. Sure, there is something cheap about McDonald when it comes to what eateries are supposed to be all about - yet isn't that precisely the point? These fast food places and other cheap things in the market place serve a purpose of making things affordable to people who otherwise would consume very inferior alternatives. Nossiter and his ilk seem to be yearning for that era of Western Civilization when a few people at the top of the social heap lived in utter luxury, with all the finest music, art, architecture, household goods and other goodies to play with, mostly at the expense of the millions of others who lived miserable lives. The partial equalization brought about by capitalism maybe something that certain Leftist ideologues dream about but the rest, following strands of the thought of Karl Marx himself, wish for that age when the few managed to dabble in the extraordinary with the rest serving them on hand and foot.
America has always been a threat to this pseudo-aristocratic utopia that seems to drive these folks and lures them into conspiracies against the best hope for the folks around the globe, namely, globalization.
Discuss this Article (1 message)
|
