The Screening Spires
Back in 2002, in one of the most utterly wonderful events in history, Steven Spielberg’s visit to Cuba coincided with Fidel Castro generously proclaiming Jaws as a film of true socialist merit. While not quite up there with Eisenstein’s Strike, the smarmy, capitalist scumbag mayor of the film was portrayed negatively enough to warm old Fidel’s Marxist-Leninist cockles.
Odd, since at the time of its release Jaws made more money than any other film in history: surely evidence against it being an anti-capitalist tract, but hey, it was the 70s; in those days the children of architects and dentists were still having fistfights over the respective merits of Comrades Trotsky and Stalin.
And what of today? Surely in these post-modern, post-ideology, postpolitical, post-history days the very notion of a film having real political strength, in the manner of Tout Va Bien, Hearts and Minds or The Battle of Algiers, has dissolved away forever? Thank God, no, but look what we have instead: hectoring, factually unsound documentaries such as Fahrenheit 9/11, or liberal howls like Goodnight and Good Luck and Syriana.
The former category can be all but discounted, as Michael Moore’s incessant bullshitting has all but discredited the political documentary as a form, but where does this leave the latter? Fine films as they no doubt are, is there not something very wrong going on? The liberal in the modern West has somehow found him or herself in some crazily decadent pact with the devil.
We wring our wrists and gaze into our ethno-organic-fluffproducing- navels over global poverty, unjust trade arrangements, corporate infringements on freedom of speech and the rape of the environment, and how do we assuage our guilt? We buy into the exact same system which promotes these conditions by handing over our fiver to be assured by the writer of Traffic that the oil industry may be ethically questionable.
No, you think? Forty years ago people gave a toss what they paid to see; why pay to see Rock Hudson and Doris Day in extended washing machine commercials when you can see Godard tearing our counterfeit system apart in Weekend? Alas, we have been bribed into watching the commercials, and not the films. Hell, even Jaws is better than the clenched brow of the complacent modern liberal.
2nd Feb 2006