Glenn Greenwald calls out bigoted imperial apologist Bill Maher for his biased, blinkered views, and it looks like he might not be returning to that TV show. That’s the way it works.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYG7GR13DnU&feature=player_embedded
I can’t stand Bill Maher, a really loathsome despicable propagandist who masquerades as a critic. File him with Rush, Sean and Beck.
Outstanding, and I’m only through the first third. Welcome to the underclass, and to the corporate-fascist Idiocracy.
Obey: A film by Temujin Doran
From Studio Canoe. This might be the best thing I’ve come across today, leading to a direct conflict with the previous post.
by Kieran Kelley
“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off” – Gloria Steinem.
There have been a number of critical condemnations of the film Argo. The most thoroughgoing that I have read is this one. What seems to me to be missing is any critique that successfully conveys the utter ludicrousness of expecting something other than lying propaganda to come out of a Hollywood film about the CIA in 1979. It is like expecting the Soviets to have made an accurate and unbiased account of KGB activities during the Prague Spring. I saw the preview before the film’s release, and after about 5 or 10 seconds of suspense it became apparent that it was a load of crap – the usual Orientalist stuff, straight out of the Reel Bad Arabs playbook, except with Persians instead of Arabs. The film mirrors the preview – at first it seems possible that one might be about to see a balanced and thoughtful movie, and then… not. Decidedly not.
Let me begin with some historical context. The CIA’s first coup in Iran, considered at the time “its greatest single triumph”,1 brought the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi to a position of supreme power. The CIA “wove itself into Iran’s political culture”.2 They created SAVAK, a notorious “intelligence” agency, trained in torture by the CIA3 and supported by the CIA and DIA in a domestic and international dissident assassination programme.4 Repression was at its peak between 1970 and 1976 resulting in 10,000 deaths.5 By 1976 Amnesty International’s secretary general commented that Iran had “the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture that is beyond belief. No country in the world has a worse record of human rights than Iran.”6
Nafeez Ahmed cites the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) who detail an extensive police state of intense surveillance and informant networks and torture “passed on to it” by US, UK and Israeli intelligence. Ahmed quotes the FAS on methods including “electric shock, whipping, beating, inserting broken glass and pouring boiling water into the rectum, tying weights to the testicles, and the extraction of teeth and nails.”7 Racism allows commentators such as Tim Weiner to blithely exculpate the CIA of fundamental guilt: “The CIA wanted SAVAK to serve as its eyes and ears against the Soviets. The shah wanted a secret police to protect his power.”8 After all, what could civilised Westerners teach Orientals about torture? But something of the real US attitude to such repression can be seen in the official reaction to the unrest developing in the late 1970s. Aside from US officials consistently urging and praising military responses to protest action, including inevitable massacres,9 the US ambassador objected strongly to a reduction in repression. In June 1978 he reported his finding that, “the Shah’s new directives to his security forces, such as instructions to desist from torture… are disorienting.”10 The funny thing about this was that it occurred after the US had forced the Shah into the liberalisation that set loose the forces that were to rip his régime apart.11 This may seem puzzling, but it made more sense for the US to push Iran into the easily vilified “enemy” hands of an Islamic theocracy than to try to maintain control over a Shah who, however repressive, was determined to develop his populous oil-rich country independently.
That is the key point that you will almost never hear about: the US was sick of the Shah. He had become too nationalistic and developmentally inclined, and they didn’t want him any more. They may not have really wanted a revolution in Iran, but they weren’t going to shed tears over the Shah’s departure. Their main fear was the strength of the secular revolutionary left, which had more popular power than the Islamists (despite SAVAK’s repression) so the US helped nurture the Islamist factions.
The CIA were far from unaware of the impending fall of the Shah’s régime, here is a quote in the film which is an instance of absolute barefaced deception: “Iran is 100% not in a pre-revolutionary state. CIA brief, November first, 1979.” Let’s not be stupid here – it is one thing to claim not to know of an impending revolution, but the film is claiming that the CIA were unaware of a revolution that had already happened. Of course some people in the CIA knew that revolution was brewing and the actual CIA brief was from August 1978 and was plainly dishonest even then. By that stage even the State Department was planning for a post-Shah Iran.12 The revolution had actually happened nearly a year before Argo claims that the CIA believed it wasn’t going to happen (the Shah fled Iran in January, Khomeini returned from exile on February 1). But Argo makers really, really, really want you to “know” that the CIA were caught flat-footed and are willing to go to considerable lengths to make you believe this lie.
There is another deception in the film which indicates a conscious systematic attempt to indoctrinate the audience. Some describe Argo as “well-intentioned but fatally flawed”, but these “good intentions” cannot possibly be reconciled with the disgusting propaganda treatment of the issue of the shredded documents put together by Iran. The documents seized by radicals in the embassy takeover were the Wikileaks of their time. Most seized documents were not shredded and they exposed massive systematic illegality and wrongdoing by US personnel, especially the CIA. They were extremely historically significant. Iran spent years piecing together the shreds and the reconstruction was a major intelligence and propaganda coup. In the film, however, we see a very different narrative played out, and we are shown a set of very different images.
In the film, for some inexplicable reason, there were xeroxed photographic images of the staff who had escaped from the embassy when it was seized by radicals. Could this simply be a cinematic plot device for generating suspense? Not really. Any number of other devices might have been used – such as a dragnet, or informants, or surveillance (mobile or static), signals interception and cryptography. You name it, if you are willing to make stuff up, then there is quite a lot you could make up that would be potentially more suspenseful and, unlike this particular conceit, wouldn’t run such a risk of the audience losing their suspension of disbelief because of such an obvious unrealism.
“Realism”, I should add, is a very import aspect of this film. It is not done in a documentary style, but is presented as a dramatisation of historical events. Let me illustrate with a quote at length from Wide Asleep in America:
[Salon's Andrew] O’Hehir perfectly articulates the film’s true crime, its deliberate exploitation of “its basis in history and its mode of detailed realism to create something that is entirely mythological.” Not only is it “a trite cavalcade of action-movie clichés and expository dialogue,” but “[i]t’s also a propaganda movie in the truest sense, one that claims to be innocent of all ideology.”
Such an assessment is confirmed by Ben Affleck’s own comments about the film. In describing “Argo” to Bill O’Reilly, Affleck boasted, “You know, it was such a great story. For one thing, it’s a thriller. It’s actually comedy with the Hollywood satire. It’s a complicated CIA movie, it’s a political movie. And it’s all true.” He told Rolling Stone that, when conceiving his directorial approach, he knew he “absolutely had to preserve the central integrity and truth of the story.”
“It’s OK to embellish, it’s OK to compress, as long as you don’t fundamentally change the nature of the story and of what happened,” Affleck has remarked, even going so far as to tell reporters at Argo’s BFI London Film Festival premier, “This movie is about this story that took place, and it’s true, and I go to pains to contextualize it and to try to be even-handed in a way that just means we’re taking a cold, hard look at the facts.”
In an interview with The Huffington Post, Affleck went so far as to say, “I tried to make a movie that is absolutely just factual. And that’s another reason why I tried to be as true to the story as possible — because I didn’t want it to be used by either side. I didn’t want it to be politicized internationally or domestically in a partisan way. I just wanted to tell a story that was about the facts as I understood them.”
To emphasise this point, the initial part of the end credits juxtaposes images from the film with real documentary images. They show how much the actors look like the people they portray. The show how they had faithfully recreated scenes from the revolution. And they show the teeny tiny hands a the poor slave children forced to piece together shredded CIA documents. Wait a second though… don’t the hands in the real photo, despite severe cropping, look more like a woman’s hands? And why would young children be used to piece together valuable and vulnerable documents written in a language that they could not possibly understand?
For some reason the film makers took it upon themselves to invent a whole bunch of “sweatshop kids” putting together these documents. There is no conceivable reason to do so that does not involve conscious deceptive propaganda. In this case, the intent is to make deliberate emotive subliminal association. What do I mean by subliminal? As Joe Giambrone explains:
The father of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays, wrote in the late 1920s:
“The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world to-day. It is a great distributor for ideas and opinions. The motion picture can standardize the ideas and habits of a nation.” (Bernays 1928)
Bernays noted the “unconscious” character of much film propaganda. It was not necessary to directly state messages, but to let the scenarios and the story world carry the messages in the background. Once immersed in the foreground story — whatever it was — the “unconscious” background elements were passed to the audience without critical interference and often without the viewer’s knowledge.
This subliminal quality is praised by Bernays as a positive thing, in his view. This is hardly surprising as Bernays’ concept of propaganda is broad in scope encompassing every medium and method of communication that exists. Bernays’ seminal book Propaganda begins:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized.” (Bernays 1928)”
Subliminality doesn’t mean that images are flashed too quickly to be noticed, rather that associations are made without conscious thought. It is true that you can find a great number of deliberately concealed images in advertising, but the claim that this is all that constitutes subliminal advertising is itself a deception. Advertising, in particular television advertising, is dominated by subliminal messaging, and it is not about tricky concealment. It uses repetition more than anything else, to make associations between advertised products and services with other desires – particularly, but not exclusively, sexual. If you want to sell a car, you don’t generally use brake horsepower or fuel consumption statistics. You associate it with a lifestyle, with attractive people, with status, with sex, with success, with normalcy, with excitement, with fine wine and food, and so forth. That is subliminal.
Obviously when film makers are unconsciously disseminating their own internalised propaganda they convey such messages subliminally. Subliminal means below the threshold, meaning, in this case, below the threshold of consciousness. This is a very, very significant manner in which an orthodox ideology, such as chauvinist US exceptionalism, is deepened and perpetuated. However the deliberate use of techniques designed to manipulate people by subliminal means can be far more powerful still. As an apposite example, let us examine Michelle Obama’s Oscar night appearance. Some have pointed out that Obama being flanked by military personnel as “props” suggests a desire to subliminally associate the First Lady and the presidency with military virtues. That may well be the case, but think how common it is to see faces arrayed behind political speakers in our times. Every time it is possible to do so nowadays, major US politicians will have a bunch of people in uniform behind them when they speak. But it is not strictly about the association with uniforms. Press conferences often pose colleagues behind the speaker – including military briefings almost as a matter of course – and when politicians speak to political rallies or party conferences, they are framed by a sea of supporters’ faces behind them.
You see, we automatically respond to other people’s facial expressions. In fact eliciting an emotional response is as much a component of facial expression as conveying emotion is, and this occurs subliminally. Now think again of Giambrone’s description: “… the ‘unconscious’ background elements were passed to the audience without critical interference and often without the viewer’s knowledge….” The people behind the speaker are being used as a way of evoking an emotional reaction like some science fiction mind control ray. Fortunately, people are fickle creatures and often their reaction to watching the back of a speaker’s head, no matter how eloquent, is to look bored or embarrassed. But clearly the technique is being perfected, and the people chosen are those who can be relied upon to convey the right emotions, hence the predilection for military personnel and partisan enthusiasts.
Similarly, subliminal messaging in advertising and film is often also aimed at a gut level. They are not conveying particular ideas, but emotions. The victim (I mean viewer) can rationalise these emotions any way they might later choose, and the brilliance of the system is that it enlists every victim’s own inventiveness tailored in response to each specific circumstance that might challenge or belie the conditioned sentimental sense of reality. So where does this leave us with regards to Argo‘s mythical “sweatshop kids”? We have precisely four references to them. The first is in our hero’s initial briefing: “The bastards are using these [pause and do gesture to indicate need to
convey novel concept] mmm sweatshop kids.” Nearly an hour later, we are shown about 5 seconds of the “sweatshop”. It actually looks very stupid if you pay attention to it, but it is over too quickly to register (more subliminality similar to that used in The Hurt Locker). What it actually shows, when the camera pulls back to reveal the scene for around one second, is dozens of children aged about five to eight sitting amidst piles of paper shreds. There is an unnatural hush, redolent with a sense of fear. Half of them are just staring into space, and there is no conceivable way that any of them could actually be doing any useful work. Accompanying the scene is one of the 16 tracks on the official soundtrack. It is called “Sweatshop” and here it is:
Note the image chosen for the album cover.
This is the ground breaking school experiment by Jane Elliot concerning racism and perception:
“Ms. Jane Elliott’s “brown eyes, blue eyes” experiment in 1970 (the third one after her first in 1968). This “Eye of Storm” documentary was made by William Peters in 1970 for ABC News and later included in the documentary “A Class Divided” (1985), which included a class reunion (of 1984.)
The most telling moment is when Russell used “brown eyes” as a derogatory term to call John name, only a couple of hours through. Though, the experiment was too short to allow it to get to the point when a “brown-eyes” person does so to another fellow “brown-eyes” person.”
All the Oscar nominated films are shamelessly promoting themselves prior to the Academy Awards. Don’t know if Django can pull it off, but here’s some of our coverage on the film:
Django: Blowing the Pulp Out of Dixie
Django’s Vengeance: Responding to the Critics
Joe Giambrone
Tarantino strikes again to howls and a little hostility. Django is at 88% with critics and 94% with audiences on the Tomatometer. We know that Spike Lee refused to see the film at all, and so I was interested to see what the negative reviews were going to point out.
Obviously, the blood, the gory violence, but many are calling the film self-indulgent and too long. On that point I disagree. The film was about as long as it needed to be to resonate as an epic, a large scale western with social commentary on slavery. Perhaps the extra time wasn’t spent in the expected ways, but running time alone is no excuse for a shoddy review.
One of the reviews that caught my attention was by Dana Stevens:
“There’s something about [Tarantino's] directorial delectation in all these acts of racial violence that left me not just physically but morally queasy.”
That’s an interesting point. Obviously the staging is effective. To what end is debatable, but it’s certainly well executed and harrowing. When dealing with something as unthinkably massive as centuries of atrocities against millions of people, and the racial psychosis, which accompanied it, I’m not sure that showing blood and violence is all that inappropriate. It could be argued that no amount of red corn syrup can make up for the real history that is meant to be conveyed, however abstractly, through these unexpected genre motifs.
Another review by J.R. Jones said,
“Like the earlier movie, in which Jewish-American soldiers assassinate Hitler, this one draws heavily on minority group revenge fantasy, the only difference being that the trick isn’t as impressive the second time around.”
To which I would reply that the word “trick” is condescending. And Django Unchained is a considerable improvement over Inglorious Basterds, which was less fun and less focused. This American story may even be too close to home for some. While it’s fine to beat up on Nazis, after so much conditioning over the decades, the idea of beating up on genteel white American males packs its own baggage here. Racism is still alive and well, and thus racially-charged American films can be risky, not to mention “tricky” to pull off.
David Germain writes for the AP:
“Django Unchained” is Tarantino at his most puerile and least inventive, the premise offering little more than cold, nasty revenge and barrels of squishing, squirting blood.”
Germain didn’t notice the iconic, mythical imagery? Scene after scene gives inventive twists in order to expose slavery to the modern viewer in ways that they haven’t seen before. Tarantino, of course, is going to be Tarantino, and you can’t fault him for that. You either appreciate a B-movie exploitation take on serious subjects, or you don’t. As for the revenge narrative, on that I do agree with Germain. It does confine the story to a set of expected outcomes, and it does lessen the impact of the ending somewhat. That is the trouble with all genre pictures, and yet is one of the main reasons they keep getting made – audiences supposedly like consistency.
This is a revenge film, and that is pretty much made clear even by the title. Is that sufficient reason to dismiss it? As one would The Count of Monte Cristo? Revenge is a strong motivator, but it is also a peg in the viewer’s mind on which to hang some weighty topics. Django’s revenge isn’t purely personal, but racial, a response to great historical crimes. Great historical crimes that have not been avenged or rectified in the real world, for the most part. Right there is the topic simmering below the silver film grains. A great wrong was done to an entire class of people, and they did not exact the kind of revenge dramatized through the person of Django. Django is a fantasy, through and through, and was never meant to be anything else. His existence is purely on an intellectual plane, the realm of conflicting historical narratives.
Does Django work as intended? Perhaps 94% of the audience today thinks so. I think so. The narrative was immersive and the journey worth taking. Was it perfect? Of course not. No movie is. Was the violence gratuitous? In places, yes. In others it was uncharacteristically restrained and realistic. Bullets do kill people.
I was particularly piqued by some of the reviews by African American reviewers. This is the meat of the issue, and I’ll quote a few opinions.
Tanya Steele wrote:
“In Tarantino’s imagination, he could accept slavery if he thought of it as black people fighting back under the gaze of a white male. This works for a culture that does not want to confront the evils and system of slavery. We want to believe that it wasn’t all that bad. That it was endurable, escapable, provided opportunities for heroics. Black people were slaves because we didn’t fight back. Django was a character created by a privileged white male.”
Seriously, that’s a stretch that just doesn’t work. Django’s predicament arises from a plausible bounty hunter narrative. Django is “under the gaze of a white male” to make this plot work. It is the initial condition which allows the story to unfold. By story’s conclusion the white bounty hunter is not only dead, but Django is free and victorious. His progression from slave to skilled assassin to free and clear hero comes in stages of development. Tarantino is certainly not endorsing slavery, and his white bounty hunter character isn’t comfortable with the practice either. It is this character who also grows and rejects the practice to such an extent that he would rather kill the plantation owner at the cost of his own life than to simply shake his hand. These myopic, cherry picked complaints ignore the rest of the story.
Cecil Brown wrote in Counterpunch,
“African American critic Wesley Morris hated it. He called it “unrelenting tastelessness — [...] exclamatory kitsch — on a subject as loaded, gruesome, and dishonorable as American slavery.”
Pretty damning stuff at first glance, but Wesley Morris actually gave the film 3.5/4 stars and also wrote,
“I really like “Django Unchained,” but I didn’t like watching it amid the moronic laughter of some of his movie-geek fans. No filmmaker gives you as much as gleefully as [Tarantino] does. He’s 49 now, and there’s a new maturity in his style.”
I can understand that Cecil Brown “hated” the film, but clearly Mr. Morris did not.
I’m quite sensitive to the perception of white money, white director, white screenwriter, black cinema. Understandably this is a very prickly topic, and can be perceived in any number of ways. Cecil Brown compares the plantation presented in the film to today’s Hollywood:
“What are the social conditions that would permit Django to be the big howling, empty nigger joke that it is? One of these social conditions, certainly, involves the relationship between black actors and Hollywood as a symbol of the plantation system. …The plantation is called CandieLand (Candyland) and is meant to refer to Hollywood itself as a producer of entertainment (Candy). Get it?”
Really?
As Hollywood did not exist during the timeframe of the film, I saw no references in the film itself to suggest that this is so. Actual candy predates the motion picture system. This is an assumption, and a bit of a leap onto a pretty thin branch. It may be Tarantino’s style to infuse everything with references to Hollywood, but the plantation system during slave times? Would Tarantino even think of this comparison?
That metaphor seems to originate with Ishmael Reed, who was admittedly biased against the film right from the opening credits. Reed wrote:
“Tarantino’s fictional blacks apparently lack that part of the brain that makes one compassionate. While some blacks are being brutalized other blacks go about their business. In one scene, a black woman is being whipped while nearby a black woman is enjoying herself on a swing.”
Those particular characters are obviously there to make a point about the divide and conquer strategies employed during slavery to create different classes of slaves, the house slave vs. the field slave. As such it would be more appropriate to examine in terms of class, and not race. The house slave vs. field slave distinction is obviously not an invention of Tarantino’s, as Mr. Reed knows full well, but an expression of known historical phenomena with resonance and relevance today. This is a highly-charged emotional topic, but it’s certainly not all concocted whole cloth by the director. He is merely pointing his camera in that direction.
Reed then admonishes the film for what it isn’t. It is not a story about a slave revolt. That’s true. It uses the genre cliché of a single man on an obsessive quest to save his lover. This makes for a tighter plot and a more focused story. It could have veered off in any number of directions, but this is the story. A slave is freed, learns to become a bounty hunter, becomes a top-notch bounty hunter, a killer, and saves his wife from slavery. How this particular narrative could earn so much ire, I still don’t understand.
We should be angry over slavery as well as racism. But lashing out at those who are trying to shine a light on both?
Tarantino has not only looked at slavery unflinchingly, but taken it to new levels of abstraction for modern audiences to ponder over. This is a very brave film that uses certain pathways into modern audience perceptions so as to bring home very real historical points, points which apply today. The psychology at work is universal, and power disparity and the stripping of human rights goes on right now somewhere in the world. Tarantino has used his own understanding and skills to craft a new take on an old subject, the way it most certainly wasn’t taught in high school. For that alone he should be treated seriously and given some leeway, some fictional license to explore things on screen. The alleged hidden racist agenda of the director is simply not supportable. Filming a situation and endorsing a situation are two very different things.
Tarantino responded to some negative audience members at a preview screening:
“It’s a rough movie. As bad as some of the shit is in this film, a lot worse shit was going on. This is the nice version.”
I do support the film, and I consider it worthy of serious consideration. Coincidentally, the NAACP has nominated the film in four different categories for its “Image Awards.”
“Despite a controversy over its use of the n-word, Tarantion’s film collected four nominations, one for best picture and others for Jamie Foxx, Samuel L. Jackson and Kerry Washington.” (Hollywood Reporter)
Joe Giambrone is a filmmaker and author of Hell of a Deal: A Supernatural Satire. He edits The Political Film Blog, which welcomes submissions. polfilmblog at gmail.
Lengthy podcast interview here.
Script Magazine notes that John Ford played a Klansman in Birth of a Nation. Tarantino had this to say:
“…he put on the Klan uniform. He got on the horse. He rode hard to black subjugation. As I’m writing this — and he rode hard, and I’m sure the Klan hood was moving all over his head as he was riding and he was riding blind — I’m thinking, wow. That probably was the case. How come no one’s ever thought of that before? Five years later, I’m writing the scene and all of a sudden it comes out.
One of my American Western heroes is not John Ford, obviously. To say the least, I hate him. Forget about faceless Indians he killed like zombies. It really is people like that that kept alive this idea of Anglo-Saxon humanity compared to everybody else’s humanity — and the idea that that’s hogwash is a very new idea in relative terms. And you can see it in the cinema in the ’30s and ’40s — it’s still there. And even in the ’50s.”
Prison industrial complex compared to slavery…
Apparently Django Unchained is almost ready, and Santa is salivating to get it into theaters. In the over-the-top, not too serious vein you’ve come to expect from a man who rewrote World War Two — to improve the ending — Tarantino takes on slavery.
