(26 May update): Louis Proyect's great review of Mad Max: Fury Road.
Kunstler: Yesterday's Tomorrowland
Yesterday’s Tomorrowland
America 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.
4 comments:
I hate those lousy movies.
Neither movie trailer grabs my attention. I am curious as to why Disney is referred to as an evil empire. They treat their employees pretty well and they have long been a champion of gay rights.
I've never been a superfan of Mad Max but I've seen parts of Mad Max I and watched Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome years ago. Tina Turner's song, We Don't Need Another Hero, and her performance as villain Auntie Entity, are the enduring features of that movie. What I find ludicrous is not only the ocean of money spent to make what is a B movie, but the near-total agreement among movie reviewers that this is a masterpiece. Armond White stands outside this consensus. Louis Proyect has a great review too: http://louisproyect.org/2015/05/22/mad-max-fury-road/
Tomorrowland (budget: $190 M) is based on a Disney ride, as is Pirates of the Caribbean. To date, it has made $42.7 M. What galls here is the idea of throwing out any old "high concept" and casting a big star and expecting that pairing alone to draw in the crowds. Pitch Perfect 2 is not perfect, but its success at the box office ($125.7 M!) is due mostly to word of mouth. (Pitch Perfect is often on TV.)
Kunstler, as you know from his column and books, is a crusty old bird. He seems to single out Disney, but from his point of view, every large enterprise, public or private, will shrink drastically or go kaput in the post-oil age. Whether it's Disney with Tomorrowland or Warner Brothers with Mad Max: Fury Road, Hollywood doesn't understand what the future is really about. I take Kunstler's specifics with a grain of salt; his views on gender and race are those of an older white man wondering what's going on. To Kunstler these are distractions from the main task at hand: preparing America to descend the peak of oil production as gracefully as possible. And so I pay attention to his main idea: oil is the lifeblood of industrial civilization, it has no adequate substitute, and it has been wasted on mass motoring and suburbanization.
During the 1970's energy crisis they told us we were about to run out. From what I have read we still have about 200 years worth. I say burn the oil as fast as we can. That will force humans to find another source of energy.
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