Empire: Hardt responds

Rob Schaap rws at comedu.canberra.edu.au
Wed Jan 31 06:45:27 PST 2001



>John Gulick wrote:
>
>>Hollywood liberals getting up
>>on their soapbox about endangered civil liberties while exporting putrid
>>celluloid crap to the world.
>
>So why is the stuff so damned popular? Dennis Redmond posted a link
>to the EU's stat site the other day showing that 75% of EU box office
>receipts go to U.S. films - in countries with their own film
>industries. It's not like they're forcing people to see the "putrid
>celluloid crap." What's up?
>
>Doug

This is the sort of thing I was on about in the great 'French Fries' debate. It's demand managing the human condition down to the level of amoeba, is all! Adorno and Horkheimer were right, fer-farting-in-a-thunderstorm!

The secret to it is probably to (a) gain initial advantage (say, wait for a first world war, so that everybody else's film stock chemicals go on munitions) and (b) make your films so stupid that language differences don't matter much, then show some T&A, apply dollops of claret, make sure it's all very noisy, and take the curse of it all by giving the undifferentiated tripe genre-and-pedagogy status (so narratives without sense get called 'postmodern' (Pulp Fiction), and stories which glorify war by way of irrelevant old letters from Abraham Lincoln (Private Ryan) get called 'anti-war', and refried swashbuckling with wooden actors, dated gender relations and old-fashioned paranoid black-chopper undertones gets called 'new paradigm' (Matrix) and old-fashioned porn gets called a 'ruthless exploration of life and death' (Crash) and cowboys shooting the shit out of each other and carving up whores (Unforgiven) gets called 'anti-violence', and cheap shit without a point (Sex Lies and Videotape) gets called 'independent'.

And If I could've written this post without having watched every damned one of 'em, er, I would've ...

And while I'm on genre labels - it doesn't matter what Australia dishes up, you lot call it 'quirky' before you've even seen it ... which you then go on not to do!

Er, time for my tablet ... Rob.



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