A merica takes pause on a big holiday weekend requiring little in the way
of real devotions beyond the barbeque deck with two profoundly stupid movie
entertainments that epitomize our estrangement from the troubles of the
present day.
First there’s Mad Max: Fury Road, which depicts the collapse of
civilization as a monster car rally. They managed to get it exactly wrong.
The present is the monster car show. Houston. Los Angeles. New Jersey,
Beijing, Mumbai, etc. In the future, there will be no cars, gasoline-powered,
electric, driverless, or otherwise. Mad Max: Fury Road is actually a
perverse exercise in nostalgia, as if we’re going to miss being a nation of
savages in the driver’s seat, acting out an endless and pointless competition
for our little place on the highway.
The other holiday blockbuster is Disney’s Tomorrowland, another
exercise in nostalgia for the present, where the idealized human life is a
matrix of phone apps, robots, and holograms. Of course, anybody who had been
to Disneyland back in the day remembers the old Tomorrowland installation,
which eventually had to be dismantled because its vision of the future had
become such a joke — starting with the idea that the human project’s most
pressing task was space travel. Now, at this late date, the monster Disney
corporation — a truly evil empire — sees that more money can be winkled out
of the sore-beset public by persuading them that techno-utopia is at hand, if
only we click our heels hard enough.
Another theme running through both films is the idea that girls can be
what boys used to be, that it’s “their turn” to be masters-of-the-universe,
that men are past their sell-by date and only exist to defile and humiliate
females. That this message is really only a mendacious effort to rake in more
money by enlarging the teen “audience share” for the reigning wishful fantasy
du jour is surely lost on the culture commentators, who are so busy these
days celebrating the triumph and wonder of transgender life.
The reviewers are weighing these two movies on the popular pessimism /
optimism scale. These are the only choices for the masses: whether to be a
“doomer” or a “wisher.” Both positions are cartoon world-views that don’t
provide much guidance for continuing the project of civilization, in case
anyone is actually interested in that. It’s either rampaging id or the
illusion of supernatural control, take your pick. I find both stances
revolting.
Anyway, it’s interesting that the real Fury Road of the rightnow
runs from Syria into Iraq starring ISIS. There is a growing sentiment in the
news media (including the web, of course) of a sickening déjà vu with these
developments. The old familiar talk of air strikes and ground troops infects
the wifi transmissions. Maybe we should think about sending Charlize Theron
over there with a few vestigial male sidekicks to load her assault rifle. How
else to git’er done? Nobody knows.
Memorial Day is a dreary moment to have to face this onrushing calamity of
rocket-propelled medievalism rampant — all those poor American soldiers
blown up and mangled the past twelve years. It’s also interesting that
the news media is totally out-of-touch with the biggest prize on the great
gameboard: Saudi Arabia. You think ISIS overrunning Iraq is bad news? Wait
until the ordnance starts flying around Riyadh. Notice, too, that there’s no
news coming out of Yemen on the base of the Arabian peninsula, a failed state
with a population nearly equal to its neighbor. If we have any idea what’s
going on there — and surely the Pentagon and NSA do — then it’s not for
popular consumption.
This is ironic because if the trouble happens to spread into Saudi Arabia
— and I don’t see how it will not — then we’ll find out in a New York minute
how America’s future is not about monster trucks, cars, dirt bikes,
holograms, phone apps, and all the other ridiculous preoccupations of the
moment.
Note: JHK’s 2014 Garden Report is
finally up
