Here is a link to a musing on the film and the death of political meaning
http://geometer.org.uk/mag/?p=78
17
Feb
10
V for Vendetta
Barak Obama does not exist, Tony Soprano does. Excursions into hyperreality
French thinker Jean Baudrillard (in)famously stated in 2001 “the gulf war did not take place”. He was of course notoriously misread because what he was alluding to was the war itself was so one sided as not to be a war at all. Also the war was constructed to be played out on television so the “reality” of the war was seemingly virtual. It was scripted, managed and sanitized with the end result being what William Merrin terms a semiotic event for the audience’s consumption rather than the flexing of geopolitical muscle. Here we see a certain Hollywood-izing of war coverage where traditional war reportage stands aside for a model that comes straight from the script factory which gave us prequels to the Gulf War in films such as Apocalypse Now.
In a similar sense the virtualization of political agendas using the small screens in our lives has become something so commonplace many are not only accepting the form of what is being placed onto these screens but the banal and meaningless content as well. The political “doorstop”, 15 seconds of pithy soundbite shapes a reality for which there is no original and often effectively says nothing. Yet we go on to vote for and defend these people and the media they are manipulating.
The model for these presentations can also take as their original television and cinema, not anything extracted from concrete events. For Baudrillard this is hyperreality. As a result political ideology is in danger of being replaced by a theatricality of the image which can overwhelm the discriminatory capacities of the viewer. We will prefer Schwarzenegger because he defeated Predator or vote for Barak Obama because we already have had an African American President on 24.
Using the radical thinking of Jean Baudrillard we suggest Barak Obama is indicative of the rise of the virtual politician, mouthing platitudes and homespun wisdom gleaned straight out of the multiplex. This hyperreal effect is indicative of the zeitgeist because not enough people are demanding reality anymore and instead are opting for reality-lite via the screens in their lives. (This assertion is exemplified by watching real today’s “Mafioso” who often are modeling their behavior on television gangsters, hence we have, in our own minds Tony Soprano being as real if not more real than Barak Obama. )
The slow death of the Real; Jean Baudrillard and Beau Travail
Claire Denis’ 1999 masterpiece Beau Travail details the fall from grace of a Foreign legionnaire Galoup (Denis Lavant). It is described as a film of male eroticism that simultaneously details the minutiae and beauty of human movement. It is, in Deleuzean terms a molecular film, as it’s ordinary images provoke such ordinary responses.( Elena del Río) We need to take a differing focus on ways of reading the film deploying the latter work of Jean Baudrillard to suggest that Galoup’s “reality” is gradually effaced by a “viral” infection of another systemic real, that embodied by Baudrillard’s term the “fatal’. We see Galoup’s slow symbolic death characterized by his inability to sustain the choreography of the soldiers life, and with the arrival of the Other, Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin) he succumbs to the fatal move of this life, ending in the powerful and enigmatic conclusion as Galoup dances deliriously. What we are left with in the end is the feeling that Denis is Baudrillardian in the sense that he too sees the fatal flaw encoded into all systems whether they be gendered, political or ideological.
My thesis is that two of the most popular shows on television over the past decade Seinfeld and The Sopranos are strangely (mis)perceived.
Firstly I am advocating that Seinfeld is a tragedy. Why? Because the characters are not pastiche, nor exaggerations but quite the opposite. They are the exact people that live next door. They are the people that run small businesses and large business alike. They are lawyers and politicians and the guy that services your car. The tragedy is that the characters from Seinfeld are all too real. Selfish, narcissistic, cynical people. And that’s the tragedy.
Now the Sopranos is a comedy for two striking reasons. Firstly the characters are nowhere to be found in real life. Here I make one proviso. They now can be found in the underworld of any Metropolis. They are in the city where I live. But they came after the Sopranos. In this sense life imitated art. The Sopranos produced Sopranos copy-cats. Gangsters too dumb to have their own style adopted it from a successful television show. And that’s the comedy.
