(Roger Deakins shot 1984)
On April 4, more than 180 art-house theaters around the country — along with five locations in Canada, one in England and one in Sweden — will screen the film in protest of Trump’s administration. Theaters in 165 cities and 43 states will host the screenings as part of a joint effort by the Art House Convergence and United State of Cinema organizations.
Is this what democracy looks like?
From government repression of protest to the myths of the American Dream, a good article.
But I keep returning to perception in all this. And to Hollywood. I have said before that the real violence of mass culture, of TV and film, is not that seen in slasher films or crime drama, but the violence of white supremacism in sentimental and maudlin melodrama. A society raised on artificial emotions and saccharine kitsch revisions of, not just history, but daily life, is going to be a sociopathic society — a society of endless regression and infantilism. If you do not recognize Lena Dunham’s Girls,or Orange is The New Black, or The Affair, or House of Cards, as shows that express white privilege, then I think you aren’t paying much attention.
“The casualties of this one-sided battle against peaceful protesters on a bridge were enormous, with some 300 of the estimated 400 protesting water protectors, both native people and non-native supporters, injured, 26 of them seriously. There was evidence that police were aiming rubber bullets at protesters’ heads and groins to inflict maximum pain and damage, with eight of the injured hospitalized, including a 13-year-old girl shot in the face, whose eye was reportedly damaged. { } The attack on Sunday night, which has been rightly condemned by UN human rights observers as an atrocity… Needless to say, Obama has done nothing and said nothing. So, while Trump is indeed a troubling figure, he is hardly out of line with the policies that preceded him.
…The repressive policies of the outgoing Democrat are just served up as less openly racist and bigoted than Trump’s, but the essential goals are much the same.
A one-sided battle of mercenaries in uniforms versus the residents.
