America Is Doomed

Yeah, I bet the title caught your attention. But this isn’t a sophisticated analysis of the decline of US manufacturing viz China, or of its sclerotic, corporate dominated political system. It’s about Death Race, the remake of the 1973 Roger Gorman film, Death Race 2000.
It’s a shit film to be honest, which is too bad because it got off to a good start. It opens in a near-future America in which the economy is in collapse; where workers have to fight riot cops to get their fair severance pay when they’re laid off; and where the prison system is run by private corporations for profit. (Hey wait, isn’t that, like, right now?)
But after that promising beginning it’s all down hill and becomes about shots of Jason Statham’s seriously hot, cut body and his hot female side-kick, what’s-her-face – it doesn’t matter because she serves no dramatic function other than to be hot.
There are next to no dramatic obstacles of interest for Jason to overcome. We already know he’s going to win the race and escape from jail and we never doubt it for a moment. So, why are we watching it? Well, because of the shots of Statham’s hot body and what’s-her-face’s mathematically perfect ass.
The only good thing about this movie intellectually is that it got me thinking about dystopias in American film, ie. imaginary, corrupted and decaying societies that demand resistance in some fashion. It occurred to me that no culture more than that of the US of A has generated so many stories about their own, ultimate demise. And the pace of their creation seems to be speeding up.

PACE OF DOOM

Think about the last few years in film. We’ve had: Children of Men, Wanted, the Batman movies, The Matrix, V for Vendetta, Wall-E, Aeon Flux, The Island, Equilibrium, A Scanner Darkly, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead, I Am Legend. I’m sure I could go on.
Each of them has a specific take on the causes or solutions of the decay, which reflect the political stance of the filmmakers (and studios and marketing directors, etc). But they all start from the premise that society will turn inward or collapse in the not too distant future.
Incidentally, remember when dystopias used to be in the 24th century, like Brave New World (1931) or at least a generation off, like 1984 (1948). Now they’re set in 2012 (Death Race), Today + 1 day (28 Days Later), 2027 (Children of Men – though the collapse is to have started in 2007), and again in 2012 (I Am Legend).
It seems Doomsday has gotten closer.
It’s possible that the proliferation of dystopic films is simply a fashion cycle, like bell-bottom jeans. Certainly the early 1970s saw its share of dystopic, doomsday type films – some of them now being remade today, like Rollerball, Omega Man (I Am Legend) with Chuck Heston, and Death Race 2000. There was the deeply trippy Maoist parable, Zardoz, that featured Sean Connery as a red guard in, uh, red diapers. And who can forget Soylent Green, also with Heston. (I tell you, is it any wonder that Heston was such a gun nut? Poor guy lived through more biblical disasters and collapsing civilizations than any actor in history.)

DEEPER PATTERN

But I think there’s a deeper pattern here than simply the whims of decadent fashionistas – and that is that both now and the early to mid-1970s were periods of social crisis. However, while the early 70s marked the beginning of the end of the cycle of radicalization that started with the Civil Rights Movement, we are in a period of unresolved stasis.
Certainly there is no generalized political upheaval, such as the movements of the 60s. But nor is there the conservative hegemony of the Reagan years or, God forbid, the 1950s. Instead what we have is a primarily directionless but growing alienation experienced by the population – that sense of disconnect that most of us feel from any and all social institutions and their values – combined with fractures in the hegemonic ideas and dominance of the American state. The former is the product of deteriorating conditions in a context of barely existent alternatives, like socialist or mass movement organizations or vibrant trade unions. The latter is as a result of the fact that America is an empire in decline and the ruling class doesn’t know how to escape that decline.
We have experienced this most dramatically in the last year with the nuclear detonation of the neo-liberal consensus about the efficiency of the market. The return of Keynes in a big way, including the effective nationalization of a significant chunk of the US financial system, put the nails in that coffin.
But it was also felt with 9/11, the sense that the United States was vulnerable. That feeling of weakness has grown with the never-ending war in Iraq and the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. And it was supplemented by the disaster of New Orleans after Katrina. The nation that had once, almost single-handedly, rebuilt Europe after World War Two, couldn’t even run a decent rescue and repair operation on one of its smaller cities.
On top of these “macro-events” there is just the day to day sense amongst Americans of going backwards – in a nation where more and more lose access to health insurance each year, where indebtedness grows and real wages fall year after year. And where everybody knows that politicians are corrupt and corporations rip off workers. Is it any wonder that there is a cultural openness to dystopic stories? They are cultural documents that historians will look back on one day as signposts on the highway to the coming doom of America.

Hancock: Delivers Too Much & Too Little

After being repulsed by rich, white guy, Bruce Wayne running around in a rubber suit in The Dark Knight, I was ready for a down and out black superhero in the latest Wil Smith video release, Hancock. I loved the last Wil Smith film I saw, I Am Legend. And, what? Shit blows up and the superdude doesn’t like cops or ridiculous uniforms? Sign me up.
Well, not quite.
Sure, Hancock has some funny bits – the armor piercing ejaculation was worth a guffaw and his drunken flight, bouncing a vanload of baddies off nearby buildings. I love that stupid shit. The whale toss? Classic.
There were even a couple of good stories in there – the hated superhero who needs a publicist to improve his image and the superhuman who’s lost his memory and now wanders alone and embittered imagining that he is the only of his kind. But that’s where the problem started. When you’ve only got an hour and a half to two hours – unless you’re making Batman films – you’ve got to be efficient and that means one story only. The result here is that neither story gets its due and none of the relationships are properly developed.
Charlize Theron spends the first half of the film throwing looks and/or jibes towards Wil Smith, setting us up over and over for something significant to happen. But then we have to wait until we’re over halfway into the film to find out what the deal is. By then we’re getting bored.
Boredom is especially a problem because the director, Peter Berg, has chosen to truncate the first story – the recuperation of Hancock’s self-image and public popularity – largely through a montage sequence, in which events are more or less repeated with slight variation. This prevents any drama or identification from developing. Then Hancock is redeemed in the eyes of the public – after years of being a much-hated public nuisance – with one daring rescue that takes up perhaps five minutes of screen time. Suddenly his anger issues are resolved and we move onto the next story between he and Charlize (never mind the total disappearance of the Jason Bateman subplot that drove the first half of the film).
Beyond these story issues, I have to ask, does anyone else out there think that it’s stupid for a superhero who is immortal, can fly, stop bullets, etc. to spend his time stopping dudes from robbing banks and liquor stores? Is that really the best use of their time? I dunno, how about that war in Iraq, or the Congo, or Afghanistan. Why not, you know, stop Israel from bombing the shit out of Gaza. And why not break the siege that is starving the population? How about those death squads killing trade unionists in Colombia and other places?
Instead, we’re led to believe that the biggest problem facing us is petty crime by (usually) black and brown people. That might make sense if you’re trying to sell homes in gated communities but its pathetic in a superhero story. I wouldn't pay to see this film in a movie theatre, I admit. But a five dollar video rental isn't so painful. Besides, it isn't as long as that stupid movie about the guy in the bat suit.

Zombies in the Street of America

The zombie film as a metaphor for political and social unconsciousness has a long and illustrious history. If they don’t begin with George A. Romero’s series of films, then certainly they have found their clearest political expression in them. Which is not to say that all, or even a majority of, zombie films are politically interesting.
Compared to, for instance, the mall setting of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead as a critique of consumerism and conformity, films like the stylish and beautiful 28 Weeks Later are intellectual ca-ca - at least after the first act's interesting commentary on the American Army in Iraq viz. the zombie-free "Green Zone".
But even the anti-conformist message of the Canadian film Fido is depressingly distanced from contemporary experience, so that all it manages is a pretty banal and hackneyed critique of the Leave It To Beaver 1950s. Hardly a revelation.
I bring this up because when I sat down to watch I Am Legend I figured that I’d have the usual experience – only more Hollywood: stunning effects that only a $150 million could buy, snappy one-line acting by a big star, and a hackneyed story line bled dry of any broader relevance, all wrapped-up in a structure so formula that Robert McKee would give it a hearty thumbs up.
Boy was I wrong.
It is 2012 and a re-engineered virus, designed to wipe out cancer, has killed off ninety-percent of humanity with most of the remaining turning into vampire-like monsters. I know this means I've been misleading by talking about zombie films but the role that the creatures play is more typical of zombies than vampires, which is why the other adaptation 28 Days Later treated them this way.
Army virologist Robert Neville (Will Smith) is seemingly the only uninfected survivor to be left in New York City, if not the world. He spends his days hunting and gathering with his dog, Samantha, working on a cure and watching news re-runs and Shrek.
He’s also coming undone from lack of human contact. He talks to his dog like a person and carries on conversations with mannequins he’s set up in the video store he frequents.
Certainly this was a big budget film with spectacular monster effects and remarkable production design. You can’t watch this “last man on earth” film and not wonder how they achieved the look of an utterly abandoned New York returning to a state of nature. Grass grows on the streets and deer lope away from hunting lions, as not a human is to be seen.
But director Francis Lawrence (Constantine) has understood that having boatloads of cash doesn’t mean you have to jam-pack every scene with toys and gadgets. For instance, there is no soundtrack, other than the occasional Bob Marley song played on the stereo of Neville. This gives the empty city a serenity it wouldn’t otherwise have. And it forces Lawrence to rely on visuals and acting to generate the plentiful tension.
And tension he has lots of. During a hunt for deer, Neville’s dog runs into a darkened building and he has to go after her. But the dark is where the mutated human creatures hide from the sunlight. And these creatures eat flesh. As Neville goes deeper and deeper into the darkness to find his dog, Smith’s acting and the shots will have you on the edge of your seat. The lack of music gives us a cleaner, more visceral experience of this abandoned city filled with danger.
And when there is music, as when Neville plays Bob Marley’s song Stir It Up to Anna (Alice Braga), it retains it’s poignance and emotional impact.
One of the most interesting aspects of this film is the politics behind it. Neville on several occasions describes New York City as “ground zero” – in reference to the man-made virus that was let loose there.
Ground zero, of course, is how New York was described after 9/11. And the virus that has been unleashed has turned the survivors of the city into hate-filled monsters. This hatred has spread outwards to engulf the entire planet. I Am Legend is thus an allegory for the post-911 world in general and of America in particular. Even the portion of Shrek that we see, and which Neville knows by heart, is a scene in which Shrek takes on a mindless lynch mob trying to drive him from his home in the swamps. Everything points us in the direction of seeing this film as a critique of the madness of bloodthirsty jingoism and prejudice.
What’s more, the survivors that we see are an African-American, a Brazilian woman and a little boy. This is refreshing from the point of view of a still mostly lily-white Hollywood but is also an interesting statement on who will be the agents of a global redemption. Of equal interest is the destination of Anna and her young companion, which is to the hills of Vermont. That probably doesn’t mean much to us Canadians but in the lore of the American Revolution and some of the more radical conceptions of early American democracy, Vermont is an important touchstone. For redemption they must literally return to the revolutionary vision of America – or at least it’s myth (and the myth or reality of the Vermont “colony” is a point of dispute in the film as well).
This film is on many levels a questioning of the current direction of the USA and the world and it is also successful as a story. Sure, there are flaws with the third act and if you look up the wikipedia page on the film there is an alternative ending that would have helped save the third act from eating itself (which it does). But as far as Hollywood blockbusters go, this is the thinking person’s cotton candy.