The commodity is empty; it has no exchange value any longer. Everybody knows this, but nothing has come along as a symbol of value to replace it (the commodity), so everybody keeps helplessly and hopelessly following it.
"Only if we are able to disentangle the future (the perception of the future, the concept of the future, and the very production of the future) from the traps of growth and investment will we find a way out of the vicious subjugation of life, wealth, and pleasure to the financial abstraction of semiocapital. The key to this disentanglement can be found in a new form of wisdom: harmonizing with exhaustion." - Franco Berardi Bifo, The Uprising
Alexander Payne knows all of this, but he dropped the ball. Was he scared? Did he not realize (this is a special pyrrhic victory of the late Capitalist system) that the secret to making transgressive ideas taboo is to give the impression that they belong to outmoded dialectical thinking and are just "too 60's" in their nature to be taken seriously? In other words, to defang them rather than ban them, as other totalitarian systems do, did and have done?
Payne was able to show how the symbology of American Exceptionalism (Manifest Destiny, the Frontier, Mt. Rushmore, Regionalism, etc.) has become exhausted and used up. When John Ford, at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence showed how Shinbone's peacefulness and modernity had been bought at the cost of authenticity and aura, he was in deep exploration of the dialectic of enlightenment and all of the problematic around notions of "progress". Payne's town of Hawthorne is like Shinbone more than a hundred years later, with its dismal bars, and its Coors Light, and its Nail Salon.
So why don't I really like this film? Because it's overladen with sad little over - telegraphed "Epiphanies", almost none of which are believable...Epiphanies are happy accidents. The artist is in a rough position: he or she must "create" them, but, at the same time, must polish and work them to the point where they seem to just ARISE. But this film is full of ersatz little moments - ersatz the way that the sentimental, uncritical use of such weighted signifiers as Black and White photography and refracted Roots Music are ersatz. This little kiss. That little glance. Someone babbles away ironically - then stops all of a sudden. The camera holds on that moment. And we realize "oh, this is LOSS - real LOSS. With nothing left that can cover it up". Man, we're banged over the head with that point before the movie is over. And all this does is to take a film that could have had something beautiful and hard in it, that could've said something real and important about the death of a dream and the grasping at empty talismans and turn it into Goyishe Schmaltz.
And the ending! The victory of appearances, again! Well, at least it's consistent...
"Only if we are able to disentangle the future (the perception of the future, the concept of the future, and the very production of the future) from the traps of growth and investment will we find a way out of the vicious subjugation of life, wealth, and pleasure to the financial abstraction of semiocapital. The key to this disentanglement can be found in a new form of wisdom: harmonizing with exhaustion." - Franco Berardi Bifo, The Uprising
Alexander Payne knows all of this, but he dropped the ball. Was he scared? Did he not realize (this is a special pyrrhic victory of the late Capitalist system) that the secret to making transgressive ideas taboo is to give the impression that they belong to outmoded dialectical thinking and are just "too 60's" in their nature to be taken seriously? In other words, to defang them rather than ban them, as other totalitarian systems do, did and have done?
Payne was able to show how the symbology of American Exceptionalism (Manifest Destiny, the Frontier, Mt. Rushmore, Regionalism, etc.) has become exhausted and used up. When John Ford, at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence showed how Shinbone's peacefulness and modernity had been bought at the cost of authenticity and aura, he was in deep exploration of the dialectic of enlightenment and all of the problematic around notions of "progress". Payne's town of Hawthorne is like Shinbone more than a hundred years later, with its dismal bars, and its Coors Light, and its Nail Salon.
So why don't I really like this film? Because it's overladen with sad little over - telegraphed "Epiphanies", almost none of which are believable...Epiphanies are happy accidents. The artist is in a rough position: he or she must "create" them, but, at the same time, must polish and work them to the point where they seem to just ARISE. But this film is full of ersatz little moments - ersatz the way that the sentimental, uncritical use of such weighted signifiers as Black and White photography and refracted Roots Music are ersatz. This little kiss. That little glance. Someone babbles away ironically - then stops all of a sudden. The camera holds on that moment. And we realize "oh, this is LOSS - real LOSS. With nothing left that can cover it up". Man, we're banged over the head with that point before the movie is over. And all this does is to take a film that could have had something beautiful and hard in it, that could've said something real and important about the death of a dream and the grasping at empty talismans and turn it into Goyishe Schmaltz.
And the ending! The victory of appearances, again! Well, at least it's consistent...