It is more than evident the vast array of Hollywood dystopia themed films that have been popularized and over-popularized in the past few decades. The dystopian genre since the stark visages of science fiction prophets such as H.G Wells and Isaac Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke and others has been a prolific influence on apathetic plights to contemplate, on some conscious level, our own decadent modern civilization and inevitable mortality. The many films we see are based on natural global catastrophes, manmade climate disasters, extraterrestrial invasions, cosmic destruction of earth (asteroids, comets), pathogenic global viral infections, biblical apocalypses, enslavement by robots or artificial intelligence, and of course, America’s innocent and genuine infatuation with zombies.
The modern popularization and enchantment with dystopia films is a direct consequence of a technologically sheltered society where convenience of living cultivates not so much an existential angst as it does a redirection of our basic weaknesses. If most necessities for immediate survival have taken on a state of abundant accessibility as industrialization has determined, than much of what remains of our physical restlessness is optimized into psychical pursuit, mostly of superficial contemplation. If death becomes removed as a clear and present danger, than it must regain relevance subconsciously by romanticism; making it into an alluring fictional idea. Modern culture immerses itself into dystopian imagery, because in many subconscious ways it detests its spiritually impoverished state of affairs and its mediocrity. Death serves as a necessary bridge between our instinctual functionality and our conscious identity. To put it another way, the dystopian seduction is or has become the prima facie of that fragile part of our nature that has been relegated.
There does appear to be a noticeable distinction between what a dystopian themed film is and how it is portrayed. The word “dystopia” is essentially the counter term to “utopia”, the latter definition meaning a place, world or society of ideally favorable conditions of comfort or happiness, and the former being defined as that oppositional time and place of great woe or despair, the “bad place” or the worst of times relating to grave circumstances of civilization. These two ideas can also take on a hybridization which makes for more intractable human suffering.
In my view, there are two forms of cinematic representation of the dystopia film or idea; the New World Order and Extinction.The first, is understood as a stable post-era civilization based on an apocalyptic event of human institutions. This event can be brought on by a long term gradual decline into a climatic rift that ultimately finds continuity in new, and insidious political systems. The classic dystopian societies conjured by Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984, are exemplary of a post-dystopian world, a world produced already from a cataclysm of sorts and has now fallen into a dormant stage of organized stagnation or self-sustaining oppression. These worlds are what become of a dystopia that is inclined more towards longevity and order; the sociopolitical dystopia.
The second form of the dystopian world is that which has become more preferred amongst Hollywood filmmakers. That of the greater “end-of-times” extremist dystopia. The world effectuated by a global disaster that has resulted in the absolute or near absolute extinction of the human species or sentient life in general. In this dystopia humanity itself is the salient aspect as opposed to the societal world which humanity subscribes to. This is the extreme form of the dystopia where no remaining reestablishment of government or any social order can be enforced due to the devastating reduction of human presence. Conversely, we usually see in this context, some human survival will remain in the form of small isolated groups, tribal nomads of sorts who are typically designated into leader/follower castes based on manifest abilities. The reversion of classic Darwinian struggle emerging from the domestication of civilized existence. These diminutive groups of individuals are determined by their respective dispositions to adapt to tooth and nail survival situations and the ensuing conflict with their own indoctrinated moral reservations that must, realistically, be overcome to some degree if power struggles are to be abated.
Given the propensity of most moderns and Hollywood producers to identify with one or the other forms, they intersect with one another unavoidably, and to understand one we must understand the other.
Zombies and Governments
The two dystopian forms stem from the same basic premise of a realized aftermath whether there are humans present or not. The New World Order has its roots in traditional warmongering supported by tyrannical psychological manipulation. The film V for Vendetta represents an extremist totalitarian future of Orwellian statism taken to its logical conclusion.The main protagonist “V” is a sophisticated revolutionary bent on bringing down the fascist government of his United Kingdom political state. His character plot is that of a violated man who suffered depraved governmental experimentation in captivity. His survival from these experiments ignites the cause for martyrdom within him and thus he becomes a self-appointed man who carries the cross of the “greater good” for the masses. He meets a demure and pretty accomplice named “Evey” by chance, rescuing her from a near gang rape in an ally. She is a somewhat sheltered yet astute protégé to V and he takes her under his wing partly by force and partly by consent. The government is controlled by the elected high chancellor Adam Sutler who is portrayed as a demagogue.
V’s crusade takes him through a series of symbolic vigilante murders of particular members who were part of the experimental covert program which he was a victim. His murders are a methodical process of elimination; snuffing out certain individuals and working his way up the totem pole of hierarchy so to speak. The chancellor of course being the last of the high ranks. What stands out in this film is that V, and his government are reactions against each other vying for the same basic power process of dominion over mass psychology. The method of control V’s state uses is primarily propaganda in its most traditional direct form. Everywhere, and on every street corner there lurks plastered posters of subliminal slogans which is a form of mass propaganda correlated to Nazi propaganda tactics in their height of power. The citizenry is bombarded on a regular basis by carefully spinned deceptive news stories that air on television, pummeling the average mind with positive innuendos about the sanctity of the state and the perennial threat of outsiders/foreigners or terrorists. The citizens must obey a strict curfew and avoid any blasphemy against the state lest they incur their own execution. It is ideally a state of a fear ridden populace where the psychological conditioning is so invasive that no one would dare even think negatively about the government. The media creates elaborate cover ups for inhuman experiments, corruptive financial gain and even acts of domestic terrorism against their own country resulting in collateral damage and death.
This New World Order is mainly one of classic fascism where mind control and political deception is the preferred method to curtail the collective temperaments of the masses. It is a pseudo-Nazi government, where Gestapo tactics are employed to dispose of certain undesirables not solely for the sake of genocide but to advance the governments own secret operations of military proliferation and biological warfare. The dissemination of mass imagery is also what sustains its hold over the minds of the average citizen. Orwell’s coinage of “Big Brother” is represented as a frightening and intimidating face of a man who speaks with emphatic conviction and jarring passion. His face is projected as a towering image that seems to miniaturize the size and worth of every common man. This overpowering authoritarian representation of his face is meant to directly affect the significance of every individual ego into submission. His ministry staff is no exception. The chancellor’s face is exaggerated in order to compensate for his lack of influence otherwise and this is exactly what V endeavors to expose to the people.
V’s face, unlike that of the Chancellor’s, takes on a much different and altogether subtler agenda.
One important thing to understand is that V is no hero; he has intentions to control mass psychology as much as the iniquitous government he battles against, but only in a different way. His mask has its own role to play. It is a facial effigy of a man named Guy Fawkes who was a real Spanish revolutionary of the 16th century and who attempted a failed coup against the government on November the 5th and as a tribute his death was canonized on this date hence V’s melodic mantra in the film: “remember, remember, the fifth of November.” V adorns a full length medieval tunic; he is a man of highly refined tastes in music, history and literature. He is the reactionary encapsulation of total resistance against the state. He is highly intelligent, physically strong and with a cultured and cunning talent for language and wit. Everything about him is traditional and everything about his state is progressive, i.e. two historical forces. He is endowed with all the necessary faculties to combat a totalitarian regime because he must, being only one man. V uses his own methods of terrorism and propaganda to sway the masses such as using his mask as a televised image, explosives and murder. His superior ability for the art of language is fitted as a weapon of its own to confound his enemies and more importantly, seduce the minds of the average man in his favor. The hypocrisy would be more palpable if V had no ability for honesty about his actions and his nature.
His iconic costume is meant to subsume the concept of humanity as a collective whole and portray it as sameness. This provides the classic feeling of self-worth but not individualistically; rather to an abstraction that is raised to a higher self, one that must be higher than the state. Both V and his state are two sides to the same coin. The mask, as V makes clear at the end of the film, is simply the representation of an idea. His refusal to reveal his true identity is another subtle and ingenious way to not only remain aloof while being involved but to agitate his enemies and give them an irritable sense of knowing and not knowing who he is. As a result, the state is forced to consider, like the masses, the messages he is preaching, subsequently undermining their power.
V’s relationship with his accomplice Evey is symbolic to his own revolutionary aims. V deliberately arranges a deceptive ploy to have her captured, imprisoned and tortured with the intention of extorting information from her about his whereabouts. She remains impressively defiant and is resilient all the way to the point of accepting her fate of execution. V at this point reveals to her the pretense of her ordeal to which at first she becomes immediately disgusted and then after some composure she is elucidated by the reason why he did it. This experiment was his way of illustrating that the ideal of truth must be so sacred and so powerful that it becomes a life-altering experience as to galvanize not just one individual but a whole population. It was also a way of exposing the true colors of an individual under extreme pressure; or the necessity of suffering as a driving force.
I used the term "Pseudo-Nazi" to describe this film’s New World Order portrayal because, unlike Nazi Germany, there is no veritable nationalist pride, but only a distorted relationship of the people to the state due to the oppression of forced obedience. By depicting fascism as entirely repressive, any sense of nationalist pride fades away and what is left is merely truth versus untruth to put it in Nietzsche’s terms. There is a clear disconnect not between the people and their government but between the people and their country.
Another New World Order film is Equilibrium.
In this plot we have deeper symbolism of the Orwellian fascist state. Once again the elements of Big Brother imagery permeate the landscape on huge telescreens and digital projections. However, this particular society has undergone a more parasitical change. In this film the methods of propaganda are as hegemonically forceful as ever, but with the reliance on behavioral control through medicated sedation. The conflict of society is controlled through direct anesthesia of emotional activity. The people are assured that the new world is a peaceful world, a world bred of harmony with the support of an innovative medicine called “Prozeum”, which is designed to totally suppress instinctual urges and aggression. The name of the medicine alludes, clearly enough to the pharmaceutical “Prozac” which is an antidepressant used to treat emotional disorders.
This state also emphasizes a caste system of “Clerics” (the obedient sedated) and the, quite simply, “sense offenders” (those who avoid being medicated). The elite Clerics of the upper echelon are permitted to show their faces, however the lower Cleric field soldiers all wear black helmets with tinted visors making them faceless enemies amongst society. The anonymity of the field soldiers also forces people to identity with the appearance of power alone, without any interaction with a human face making authoritarian control vastly stronger. The society consists of a highly regimented bee hive conformity. All are stripped of their individual liberty and made into impulsive automatons. Everyone dresses the same, remains sedated in the same blank sheepish behavior and any external stimuli is made drab and lifeless in order to prevent any influence on emotions. The authorities go through great lengths to uncover insurgent underground groups of sense offenders and to destroy any remaining trace of what can be considered culture. Art, decorum, music, the vibrancy of colorful panorama, anything that would arouse urges or feelings is banished and destroyed. This purification of basic human expression is a destruction of culture denoting nihilism on an apocalyptic scale. Disconnecting one from any substance of a past is much like multiculturalism’s masquerade of preserving one’s own identity while adopting another.
The cold and calculating demeanors of the Clerics, to the emotionally active sense offenders, creates a dissonance between reason and passion. The Clerics are those of an exceedingly rational mind, the masculine mind, and the sense offenders take on a more chaotic feminine opposition. The state advocates that Prozeum, the supposed miracle cure, has worked to be a solution to the problem of human warfare. Eliminate the source that causes civil unrest and the outcome will be peace and cooperation. This theory is simple enough, however even with the constant reiteration that peace reigns supreme, the presence of armed soldiers enforced around the city makes that idea positively hypocritical.
The protagonist John Preston, plays a high ranking officer working for the government and is recognized as the most disciplined and loyal in the hierarchy of Clerics.
He captures a female sense offender and immediately becomes enamored by her alluring beauty and charm, thus provoking dangerous feelings within him. This begins a gradual unraveling of his stoic reserve as he descends deeper into rebellion against the state, withdrawing from his medication and becoming more human.
He proceeds to ally himself further with the sense offenders until he eventually becomes the chosen man to spearhead the revolution. Preston’s relationship with the woman can be viewed as the catalyst that stimulated his emotional rekindling. Ergo, she acted as the spiritual feminine counterpart to correct the emotional imbalance within Preston and in this way she infiltrates the state herself indirectly through him.
The overwhelming spiritual degradation depicted in this film is what occurs when the state cleverly incorporates or invents another element of control (medicine) that alleviates the demand to control its own population by force or propaganda. By taking the burden of dependence off of themselves and onto another artificial medium the state averts the attention of its citizens to something else altogether, and this allows the state to become as autocratic and dominating as it wishes. It is a monopoly of freedom through a Huxlean diversion of cultural sedation. The Equilibrium of New World Orders, suggests an attack against the idea of humanity by treating it as a negative; as something to be cured and corrected, where nature, universally, is cured and corrected. This promotes a better social cohesion for the government because the enemy is no longer the state but the Judeo-Christian idea of one’s own flawed self.
The dichotomy of masculine and feminine spirits is portrayed as well, in the science fiction dystopia of The Matrix. In the film, the machine AI has established a superorganism of self-replication and self-correction. This post-biological world means that humanity has been reduced to an expendable resource to further the means of only survival for the ruling AI, rather than production. The machines are the calculating, masculine , purely rational aspect of what nature is in essence to evolution. The human world, on the other hand, is that which still remains on the fringe of an unrestrained feminine primitive existence. The machines simulate programs that function by the encoded expressions of emotions, thoughts and even companionship. To the human mind, this is sufficient enough to provide some solace to their unfortunate circumstances, even if they are aware of the hyperreality that the Matrix is. In other words, they are willing to consciously accept the simulation as long as it is placating. This stands true for the innate political gullibility for most people to endure a tyrannical government even at the cost of giving up their own autonomy.
The Architect’s speech is, in my view, the best way to not only understand the entire Matrix series, but to illustrate the historical relationship between man and government, between man and the simulacra:
Quote :
The Architect: Hello, Neo.
Neo: Who are you?
The Architect: I am the Architect. I created the matrix. I've been waiting for you. You have many questions, and although the process has altered your consciousness, you remain irrevocably human. Ergo, some of my answers you will understand, and some of them you will not. Concordantly, while your first question may be the most pertinent, you may or may not realize it is also irrelevant.
Neo: Why am I here?
The Architect: Your life is the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the matrix. You are the eventuality of an anomaly, which despite my sincerest efforts I have been unable to eliminate from what is otherwise a harmony of mathematical precision. While it remains a burden to sedulously avoid it, it is not unexpected, and thus not beyond a measure of control. Which has led you, inexorably, here.
Neo: You haven't answered my question.
The Architect: Quite right. Interesting. That was quicker than the others.
The Architect: The matrix is older than you know. I prefer counting from the emergence of one integral anomaly to the emergence of the next, in which case this is the sixth version.
Neo: There are only two possible explanations: either no one told me, or no one knows.
The Architect: Precisely. As you are undoubtedly gathering, the anomaly's systemic, creating fluctuations in even the most simplistic equations.
Neo: Choice. The problem is choice.
The Architect: The first matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art, flawless, sublime. A triumph equaled only by its monumental failure. The inevitability of its doom is as apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every human being, thus I redesigned it based on your history to more accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of your nature. However, I was again frustrated by failure. I have since come to understand that the answer eluded me because it required a lesser mind, or perhaps a mind less bound by the parameters of perfection. Thus, the answer was stumbled upon by another, an intuitive program, initially created to investigate certain aspects of the human psyche. If I am the father of the matrix, she would undoubtedly be its mother.
Neo: The Oracle.
The Architect: Please. As I was saying, she stumbled upon a solution whereby nearly 99.9% of all test subjects accepted the program, as long as they were given a choice, even if they were only aware of the choice at a near unconscious level. While this answer functioned, it was obviously fundamentally flawed, thus creating the otherwise contradictory systemic anomaly, that if left unchecked might threaten the system itself. Ergo, those that refused the program, while a minority, if unchecked, would constitute an escalating probability of disaster.
Neo: This is about Zion.
The Architect: You are here because Zion is about to be destroyed. Its every living inhabitant terminated, its entire existence eradicated.
Neo: Bullshit.
The Architect: Denial is the most predictable of all human responses. But, rest assured, this will be the sixth time we have destroyed it, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it.
The Architect: The function of the One is now to return to the source, allowing a temporary dissemination of the code you carry, reinserting the prime program. After which you will be required to select from the matrix 23 individuals, 16 female, 7 male, to rebuild Zion. Failure to comply with this process will result in a cataclysmic system crash killing everyone connected to the matrix, which coupled with the extermination of Zion will ultimately result in the extinction of the entire human race.
Neo: You won't let it happen, you can't. You need human beings to survive.
The Architect: There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept. However, the relevant issue is whether or not you are ready to accept the responsibility for the death of every human being in this world. The Architect: It is interesting reading your reactions. Your five predecessors were by design based on a similar predication, a contingent affirmation that was meant to create a profound attachment to the rest of your species, facilitating the function of the one. While the others experienced this in a very general way, your experience is far more specific. Vis-a-vis, love.
Neo: Trinity.
The Architect: Apropos, she entered the matrix to save your life at the cost of her own.
Neo: No!
The Architect: Which brings us at last to the moment of truth, wherein the fundamental flaw is ultimately expressed, and the anomaly revealed as both beginning, and end. There are two doors. The door to your right leads to the source, and the salvation of Zion. The door to the left leads back to the matrix, to her, and to the end of your species. As you adequately put, the problem is choice. But we already know what you're going to do, don't we? Already I can see the chain reaction, the chemical precursors that signal the onset of emotion, designed specifically to overwhelm logic, and reason. An emotion that is already blinding you from the simple, and obvious truth: she is going to die, and there is nothing that you can do to stop it.
*Neo walks to the door on his left*
The Architect: Humph. Hope, it is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness.
Essentially what the architect explained to Neo is that the survival of the Matrix is not dependent entirely on the biochemical outputs of human beings to supply energy sources for the machines, but more so on a continuous purge of “The One” or what the Architect calls the “anomaly”, in order to maintain the stability of the Matrix while simultaneously preventing any potential widespread sedition. Furthermore, a certain degree of resistance is permitted as long as it is controlled; this is a very significant point in the dialogue as it pertains to governmental stability. Such an absolute totalitarian foothold the machines have established over the humans that the Architect can be as open and honest with Neo about their true agenda without risk of being undermined or overthrown. This is an example of total despotism. This also connotes, distressingly enough, that a degree of political mind control is logically necessary to quell the dangerous psychophysical fluctuations of the human condition as much as industrialization is necessary to tame wild nature for cities to be built.
A world where human behavior and political institutions are absent can be starkly unnerving or, more of a parody. The second dystopian form, Extinction, makes the darkness of an apocalypse appear to be palliated by the prospect of a New World Order itself. The zombie apocalypse theme has swept through American minds finding its identity as a playful cliché with a tinge of genuine horror. There is an understandable reason why Americans treat the idea of a Zombie endemic to be somewhat comical, because of: A) they understand on some level that it is a silly fantastical idea, one that would be most unlikely to ever occur, or B) the melodramatic mindlessness of Zombie behavior in general is patently humorous in itself. Given the indulgence for entertainment for entertainment’s sake that the American mentality is drawn to, the latter is more viable.
Zombie films such as Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later, both portray a post-apocalyptic world where humans have fallen victim to a widespread infection dramatically mutating their consciousness which results in uncontrolled vicious behavior.
The Dawn of the Dead and the 28 Days Later series depicts the aftermath of the Zombie apocalypse with those wandering groups of survivors who are each disposed to their own skills and abilities to cope with the catastrophe. Despite any differences between themselves, every member in the groups are rather spoofed characters shown as the cliché gun-toting renegades with no stable moral constitutions, other than self-preservation.
This Zombie virus spreads ruthlessly, drastically mutating every individual into rabid brainless animals. The concept of natural human social selection arises from the aftermath.
No explanation for the spread of this Zombie infection is provided in these films because the cause of the infection or the virus is for the most part incidental. The Zombies merely act as a perpetuating element to emulate the significance of power struggles amongst humans in an environment based completely on survival. The Zombie virus, when contracted, is always shown to stimulate an instantaneous physical transmutation. Zombism, while deftly contagious, is not necessarily fatal. The victim still retains a certain degree of consciousness and existence, however chaotic it may be. If the natural purpose of a virus is taken away, (fatality of the organism), and only a drastic change of an aberrant consciousness occurs, than what we have is a dystopia not entirely indicative of the end of the world, but moreover, the end of the human spirit, the last frontier of human culture plunged into the abyss of unalloyed depravity and decadence which is the form of the Zombie.
The extinction film I Am Legend, tells a closer story of the Zombie apocalypse, of a viral infection that became rampant and contagious.
One single man survives amongst the outbreak and along with his lone fortune in the disaster he also happens to be a brilliant virologist. The world is populated by vicious mutated human beings who fell victim to the virus. This time an attempt is made to offer a practical reason for the outbreak. All that is known about the virus is its origin as an initially developed revolutionary cure for cancer from a genetic alteration from the measles disease. Somehow-it is never made satisfactorily clear-the virus becomes a deadly airborne pathogen spreading uncontrollably. It goes completely unexplained how this one man retained immunity to the contagion other than by pure luck.
Here, the idea of group power struggles is eliminated and only one solitary sole survivor remains. His own survival is aided by that makeup of heightened mental skills and physical abilities that act as a counter measure to combat an overbearing environment, of which I pointed out earlier in the socio-revolutionary archetype, and like the revolutionary, he plays the role of dedicating all of his time and energy to the redemption of humanity. This film is not based so much on an apocalypse, but the despair of loneliness and isolation. In many ways, the extinction dystopia is a dystopia of the self, where no otherness exists except as a potential threat or as grotesque degeneracy; an emaciation.
The Walking Dead Series is one of the best examples portraying modernity’s love affair with the Zombie theme. Here we have a complex storyline that retains all of the clichés of the Zombie apocalypse, but with a more serious, genuine dramatic touch. The power struggles of different groups of survivors develop gradually into stable hierarchies. The Zombies depicted in films are usually that which are in the form of ferocious snarling, biting animals with Olympic sprinting speed. In this series the Zombies are far less aggressive, almost to the point of docility. They move slower and with less purpose but are highly dangerous nonetheless.
The characters all take on roles that play out as an epic human drama, with the Zombies acting as a binding force. Here is the Extinction dystopian world that is geared to evolve into a New World Order. There is a very palpable relationship between the humans and the Zombies in this series. It is a world where the surviving humans battle against the Zombies, but co-exist with them as well. This co-existence is exemplary of how romantic modernity has made the idea of a world of depravity and sickness. The extinction dystopia is significant for its undertones of basic human strife; of a reversion to primordial conflict.
The Zombies are that force of nature that places individuals in a goal-oriented mode which tests their true strengths and weaknesses to overcome more physical life-threatening obstacles. The desire to place human culture in such a realistic and meaningful way, into a story about human degeneracy, is a subliminal stigma of modern culture. This series is a more grievous look at how modernity is realistically attempting to accept and make peace, in some ways with the idea of living in a wasteland of disorder by turning it into something meaningful and worthy of academy awards.
People are drawn to the showcase of human struggle in the Zombie theme because it is where real strength and reserve is tested amongst the survivors. Where the true disdain for the apathetic monotony of modern living is replaced by a fantasy world where individuals are made into powerful magnanimous personalities; individuals with destinies and goals. Hence, the dystopian anguish as it relates to a culture where the very idea of culture comes to be represented as what it is subliminally perceived to be which is a shadow of itself.
Dystopian Hybridization of Modernity
Never has there been a time where a culture has indulged with more fervor and enthusiasm and approbation, the quality of its own listless decadent self-destruction. This romanticism with the dystopia means that a very innate aspect of human purpose is missing when it must be idealized and turned into something evanescent and out of reach.
Aldous Huxley and George Orwell must be taken as the voices of reason in this matter. Their own prophetic insights intersect to give us the deductive framework to understand this dystopic phenomenon in the modern mind. It is difficult to place either the Huxlean or Orwellian reasoning as superior to the other. Huxley could be viewed as having a deeper grasp of the ramifications of political mind control. The subtly of how it is applied can hook deeper into social behavior based on the methodology of parasitism. The Huxlean strain is based on using our natural affinity for pleasure to dull our sensitivities into submission, by imprisoning ourselves to our own nature.
The overabundance of stimuli acts as a desensitization which lowers our awareness of our own actions, making our effort to perceive reality lackadaisical. This in turn weakens our resistance to social pressures and conventions that would threaten to usurp our powers of reason. The same way a drug addict needs physical euphoria to keep his equilibrium and temperaments in a functional state, the constant exposure to positive mental stimuli creates a psychological dependency which can only survive by being fed illusions. The illusion that the citizens in Brave New World were living in a utopia where happiness and love and pleasure is the foundation of its ethos, and the irony of the dystopia that Huxley was able to grasp. The domination of a totalitarian society can be as non-threatening and permissive as it likes as long as it constructs the institutions that encourage blissful indulgence while insuring in the long run that psychologies are primed to live with them. Thus social engineering in a most passive-aggressive insidious form is the exacting method to inhibit disobedience by inhibiting the tendency to become disobedient.
The consideration of caste systems in the dystopic films also shows that even with liberal democracy’s abnormal obsession of equality, it has some appreciation for still remaining true to unequal human nature. This is of course is mitigated by recognizing this existence of inequality only in dire survival circumstances. Nevertheless, it is acknowledged as being meaningful.
We can see the Huxlean strain revealing itself in the world of social media. The language instinct is subverted by the constant interaction through artificial mediums. The speed and efficiency of the information age cannot sustain itself unless the transmission of communication takes on a form that allows it to keep up with the speed of how it is transferred. The silly slang text acronyms that are popular when using the mode of messaging in the Smartphone era, means that the adaptive instinct of language must undergo a generational variation that requires it to be more trite and banal in order to survive under the conditions of speedy communication. This reduces language to a superficial function, merely for the sake of inclusion within the social whole. This might be the first stage of the Orwellian misinformation of Newspeak.
The world of “Airstrip One” in Orwell’s dystopia has profound consequences, even more profound than Huxley’s. Orwell may have posited a world that was more overtly totalitarian and fascist, which was a somewhat narrower view of the governmental state that would survive in the future. But there is no doubt that he picked up on the same perniciousness of mind control. Huxley saw biological engineering as the way to create mind controlled castes systems of alphas betas, deltas and all the way down to the most primitive inferior automatons or “Epsilons” that serviced the upper class. The irony is that this entire hierarchy is based on mind control, where not even the top upper class, is free from psychological manipulation. The higher classes are vastly more educated and erudite than the lower classes, despite this. However, Huxley accurately fathomed the difference between knowledge and intelligence and in turn exposed that sometimes education is simply another shallow acquisition, like possessions or social status, to maintain the fickle pretense of superiority.
Orwell understood that disconnecting man from his past is the most effective way that he can be controlled by a government. Indeed, in his story there is acutely more emphasis placed on the idea that the psychological convolution of doublethink acts as a subconscious dissonance. War is peace
Freedom is slavery
Ignorance is strength
Mind control is effective when it is conditioned over a long period of time; when a word becomes a vestige, losing its referential to the idea that it was modeled to represent, therefore it can be associated with any idea, regardless of how contradictory it might be. Huxley proposed it by biological engineering and hypnopaedia, and Orwell saw it as invasive propaganda through generations of thought policing. Hypnopaedia is the Huxlean symbolism for sleep induced mind control through cerebral suggestion. This form of mind control in relation to sleep is significant. Sleep is a form of unconsciousness and if one has a low awareness to be unable to resist suggestive manipulation, then one is operating in a form of a conscious coma where an idea becomes so widely held that it is accepted as a self-evident. Ergo, the unconscious slumber of the modern mind under the blanket of ideological comfort.
The protagonist in 1984 was an empty broken man with no relationship to his past. He lived in spiritual squalor and constant paranoia and fear that Big Brother conditioned him in. It is mostly a dystopia not entirely about fascist regimes or the tyranny of propaganda, but of the tragic lack of self, a disconnect with one’s own identity caused by being raised in a controlled environment where every idea, source of information, word or phrase is a deceitful ploy to erase the connection to oneself and to the rest of the world; the Orwellian dystopia of the self. This is where we see the rising influence of memes as it is an adaptation to sheltered environments. Overpopulation produces a reduction in boundaries and in order to sustain the rampant mergence of human social grouping, dense urbanization must moderate this issue by increasing the influence of memes.
The Extinction dystopia is becoming increasingly more attractive to the modern mind because it is more dramatic. It weighs more heavily on a natural drive to break through repression and spiritual impoverishment of a rigidly regulated world. After all, the New World Order, no matter how corrupt or nightmarish, still implies a world of rules and social etiquette based on institutions that are indissoluble when it comes to regulating freedom in a sociopolitical environment. The age of libertarian interest is cultivating this desire to do away with natural order in its most sensible form, and revert to a primitive state or at the very least an ethos where some illusory form of anarco-capitalism can be plausible.
The time of the mimetic dystopia works very much like natural selection in that particular favorable conditions must be present to allow the emergence of memes that are conducive to those conditions. Where natural selection ends, adaptation picks up, both flowing into one another. A propagandist is the inculcator or, the mimetic filter to prime the conditions that allow for the proper memes to be successful.
Quote :
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
-Joseph Goebbels
Quote :
Man is by nature gregarious he feels himself to be member of a herd, even when he is alone in his room with the curtains drawn. His mind retains the patterns which have been stamped on it by the group influences. A man sits in his office deciding what stocks to buy. He imagines, no doubt, that he is planning his purchases according to his own judgment. In actual fact his judgment is a mélange of impressions stamped on his mind by outside influences which unconsciously control his thought.
– Edward Bernays
Although Bernays may have applied in some ways Machiavellian pragmatism to the method of propaganda, Machiavelli himself had a grasp on the modern intellectual makeup of common men.
Quote :
It should be observed here that men should either be caressed or crushed; because they can avenge slight injuries, but not those that are very severe. Hence, any injury done to a man must be such that there is no need to fear his revenge
. –Machiavelli
It is observed here that the very idea of politics acts as the subterfuge for the science of psychology and how it is applied to group behavior. It is about ongoing, gradual attrition of the psychology to eventually submit without submitting, the modern double standard.
I mentioned before, the Extinction dystopia and its conception in the modern mind of bringing about an acceptance of the decadence in their own time and place by. The recent phenomenon of massacre shooters is another symptom of a culture reacting against itself; an autoimmune reaction toward a debilitating virus.
The American massacre shooter is the manifestation of the personality type modernity produces. He is the logical element of this dystopic anguish to eliminate culture through reactionary means. He is young, isolated, alone, genetically displaced, and with a lost purposeless plight and most importantly, he is male. When he kills he attempts to kill the society and the culture he feels has bastardized him. The senselessness of the killing, means something else altogether. When one kills at random to fulfill not any purpose or goal besides self-vengeance, not only is it a clear representation of extreme narcissism, but it shows as well, a complete lack of nobility or honor in anything real at all. The massacre shooter has no worthy outlet to direct his Will, thus he undergoes a spiritual implosion, where his Will fractures into a violent thrust into a kind of darkness, into a cosmic void. He normally commits suicide because death validates his foolish martyrdom, but it also validates his existence, that he never had.
The importance of the interconnection of the Huxlean and Orwellian perspectives will expose many truths about which dystopian reality succeeds future generations. The academic man of modernity could be Nietzsche’s Last Man in full strength. The idea of force and motion comes from either a New World Order based on force or an Extinct desolation based on stagnate motion. Modernity is finding its way toward one or the other dystopia through globalization and the cosmopolitan imperial march of liberal democracy.
What psychological type will emerge from the dystopian anguish? The type possible to embrace all aspects of his nature regardless of the sinister furies that stir within it? The primitive man with a sensible formidable contempt? Or the more likely base man with no power of reason, or the ascetic-hedonist, the one who absorbs the contradiction of modernity and directs it to an objective. why not take it to its logical conclusion?
This thread is really impressive. You and Anfang have surprised me recently. Good to know there are about 4 or 5 true intellects on this forum.
One thing that struck me deeply in Matrix Reloaded, was the end of the discussion between Neo and The Architect, where Neo "chooses" Trinity and "love". The Architect is displayed to seem surprised, and that the 6 anomalies before Neo, chose self sacrifice and reintegration into the Matrix. The 6 anomalies before Neo were humanitarians, choosing survival of the whole instead of selfishly risking them all for "love".
I find this extremely, extremely unrealistic, and idealistic. Because Neo's choice is "selfish". That seems normal to me, not exceptional. So the script inverts reality on that point. The 6 previous anomalies would have predictably chosen self interest instead of "saving humanity". Because who would "save humanity"?
This reasoning, and the context of the choice, is the essence of Christianity and humanist ideology. So that's the essence of the Matrix trilogy.
Neo is supposed to represent the "Christ" figure in most contexts, except when it comes to love, where he sacrifices all humanity for his personal relationship.
That is idealism, not realism. Because the context is switched to make it seem as if selfishness is a surprise rather than the norm. That's false in my opinion. Because humanism, and self sacrifice "for humanity", can be a communal lie.
For example, put this question to any random person, or pose this question at the cow barn on ILP to the sheeple. "Would you sacrifice your own son, for a stranger, in exchange for the life of another son genetically unrelated to you, and you don't know him?"
Would you prefer the life of a complete stranger over your own family? That is the true context of the end of the dialogue. It poses that it is a surprise that people choose their own, their own self interests, instead of normally, automatically choosing self sacrifice on behalf of "humanity".
That insight struck me deeply, ever since I first saw the movie when it was released in the theaters. It doesn't make sense in the largest context of all three movies. And it destroys all sense of "realism" of the movie. It betrays the fantasy and fiction.
It unveils the true intent of the matrix series as a propaganda piece of humanist ideology. And that's what it is, secular humanism. The christian morality, the underlying message, the concept of zionism in the final film. A secular humanist "update", a version 2.0, of the Bible.
A Bible for modernity and post modernity, something that the masses can understand today......making the Bible relevant and easily understood for today's mass mind slaves.
The only way I can rationalize Neo making "his own decision", even though this is a philosophical stretch, is that Neo is "breaking the cycle" of computer programmed expectations. The Architect, and the Oracle, are supposed to be creating a program to which the anomaly keeps reintegrating itself into the matrix. So this "choice" at the end seems superfluous.
And it's stupid. It's much too "dumbed down" to make logical sense. It's a commoner fairy tale. Choosing "love". Well of course the protagonist is going to "choose love".
So the surprise, shock, and awe, doesn't make sense from a fictional context. It would be more surprising, a true surprise, if Neo became a humanitarian, and made the "Christ decision", and decided to betray Trinity, Morpheus, and Zion, and reintegrated into the computer. I would love to see that alternative ending. What would happen?
Actually here is where things get really interesting.
Isn't Neo's death, in the end, his submission to Agent Smith...............the same "choice"????
Didn't he really make the Architect's choice??? Neo wanted to "choose" other than the programming. He wanted to demonstrate Free Will's triumph over Determinism and Pre Destiny. But, in the end of the movie, he fell back in line with the computers.
Because Trinity died anyway.
Or what if the sentinels accidentally killed Neo and Trinity on the ship??? They would have remained infected by Agent Smith, and exterminated Zion.
That is the implication when the Architect said "We are prepared to take such risks and losses" to Neo.
Of course the humans and Zionism "wins" in the movie. And the computers also "win". It's the typical "win win" scenario.
But these points have a lot to them.
Neo wanted to go against his programming, but in the end, succumbed to it, by sacrificing himself to Agent Smith.
The best question I can manage is......would the computers have predicted that outcome, or did they even care?
It actually could be lose-lose for the humans. Because The Architect essentially admitted in the dialogue that [we don't need the humans and the anomaly anymore, anyway] presumably because the machines "won" and their programming is now so sophisticated that human survival doesn't matter anymore, and computer evolution is now too far beyond humanity.
That leads into transhumanist ideology.
However I can't really discuss these observations of mine elsewhere.....
The question the Architect poses to Neo is essentially a rehash of red pill, blue pill.
An either-or dichotomy again, a simple dualism, to connect to the average manimal of today.
Black and white, no other options or parameters.......
And with Neo's self sacrifice to Agent Smith.......the choice is cancelled anyway, revealing the story as a "one line plot" with no true variables.
However I still support the artistry behind the Matrix.
The Matrix is essentially a modern or postmodern "rehash" of the christian bible and a "postchristian" interpretation of global social and cultural trends, or "western civilization".
The idea of salvation is one that assuages mankind’s need for something higher than himself because even though through progress man attempts to eliminate himself, he must have a reward that grants him a kind of formless form. In the case of objectivity, salvation becomes a realistic goal, and this may be what the singularity in black hole theory in physics is about. It proposes a breakdown of all ideas and truth but then they are transformed into a mass of immutability of end and beginning. This is the salvation of technological progress in this respect in that this immutable formless form is the bringer of a heavenly outcome to becoming less of what one is and more of what one should belong to. Mimetically it is into a singularity; genetically it is into a superorganism. The prospect of merging both together into perfect harmony is what is sought after. Of fusing both end and beginning together, life would then become an unchangeable void, which is what progressivism seeks.
What does Heisman have to say about this...?
Mitchell Heisman wrote:
The overcoming of biology can lead to the extinction of the biological human race. This is the real evolutionary meaning of the left: the progress of equality culminates in a postbiological world; the displacement and eventual extinction of biological humanity. The progress of the logic of modernity means taking biological factors out of the equation until there are very literally none left.
When artificially intelligent machines become sufficiently intelligent, the fight for their rights against prejudice will only be a fulfillment of the enlightenment definition of the human. The overcoming of prejudice on the basis of race and sex, after all, is the overcoming of biologically based prejudices. The elimination of prejudices towards biological origins leads to the elimination of prejudices towards the biological human race, or prejudice towards biology in general. This leads to non-prejudice towards artificial life, especially those specimens that fit the original enlightenment definition of rational, morally disciplined beings.
Just as overcoming racism within humanity extends to the overcoming of speciesism in the form of animal rights, the same principles apply to extending the circle of rights to artificial “species”. Whereas non-human animals are traditionally considered inferior, artificial intelligences will likely evolve reason to claim superiority over biological humans. AI superiority is identical to the superiority of the path of modernistic “progress” itself.
While biological evolution is suffocated and enslaved, economic freedom, the great engine of technological evolution, flourishes and effectually maximize the path to artificial intelligence. Technological evolution is maximized, while biological evolution is minimized. These trends combined amount to a policy of rational biological self-destruction.
One would be profoundly mistaken in thinking that human biology’s slavery to machines is something of the future. The liberal free market system has already made enormous progress in subordinating genetic interests to economic interests. The human race is well on its way to fulfilling this program of freedom from biology.
Genetically engineered humans who define themselves as transhuman or posthuman are leaving behind the basis for human solidarity as humans. In abandoning their humanity, they may either reject solidarity with humans or be rejected by “humanists”. Genetically engineered humans who are designed to be superior to other humans may understand the specific genetic basis of specific kinds of superiority over humans. This is not the best formula for political equality with humans.
Modern man fills himself with knowledge, because he must compensate for a lack of imagination. He fuses this knowledge with a congealed practicality, a feminine practicality taken to a dangerous height. Logic loses its intimacy to his nature and becomes only a means to adapt to an environment that is logically over-extended, conceptually over-produced. Logic in the Academic man, the man of pure rationalism means only a superiority of what his master has instilled in him. His mind is replete with an idea of a spirit, but he remains only a cog, a highly functional cog, but a cog nonetheless. He is a residual form of imagination because his imagination is instituted. His creativity is artificially imbued with whatever is optimal for it to be creative.
He must fill himself with knowledge not to understand it, but to use it, to apply it socially, fiscally, and to a purpose that is to the Will of a vague voice that is not his own. This voice he associates as what is higher than him, this artificially instituted voice is his calling, his function in reality. The institution for him is the affirmation of his seed and this is what makes it degenerate because it is based on powerlessness.
But his unconsciousness speaks out to him that somewhere what he knows is not what is true, and there he still recognizes the superior/inferior distinction even on an appeasing level. His nature will try to counter this severe imbalance by making him assert all that modernity is opposed to by respecting its sentimental messages. He will acknowledge inequality as long as he correctly places it within a neutral context where no transgression can give him away.
**********************
Modern dystopic anguish deplores itself as exactly what it portrays as sick and vile, and yet it attempts to create a world where it can live with it, romanticize it. It fantasizes a world where human degeneracy is not eliminated but circumvented by a way to live with it, by looking in its face and seeing some glint of quality. By in fact making oneself sick and vile as well.
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37123 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
The World War Z dystopia, in my view, is the message that to survive you must make your self ill. The healthy man must become sick, a zombie, so that he will not attract the ire of the rest.
I think Lyssa talks about it in some thread. I don't remember which one.
The World War Z dystopia, in my view, is the message that to survive you must make your self ill. The healthy man must become sick, a zombie, so that he will not attract the ire of the rest.
The cost of survival isn't too high then, not even too undignified, as long as it means some very short reprieve for you to accomplish something more?
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37123 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
The World War Z dystopia, in my view, is the message that to survive you must make your self ill. The healthy man must become sick, a zombie, so that he will not attract the ire of the rest.
The cost of survival isn't too high then, not even too undignified, as long as it means some very short reprieve for you to accomplish something more?
Well, in the movie the protagonist has the antidote. He infects himself to survive....or, in social contexts, he pretends to rise above the masses of brain-dead. He tricks them, for example, to become President, by wearing their clothes, putting on their values, smelling like them.
But, I don't know....if you pretend long-enough do you lose yourself in the pretense?
Once more the Triver's quote is brought to my mind:
Trivers wrote:
If…deceit is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as to not betray – by the subtle signs of self-knowledge – the deception being practiced. Thus, the conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naïve view of mental evolution.
For me, this internal social artificiality, based on a communion of pretentiousness, is the nihilistic mind-set. You erase the past, discredit it, deny its applicability, so that you can then replace it with a fake one, full of hypocrisies, of masks - identities built on make-up, clothes, institutional roles and so on.
This is why nihilism is a must for internal brain-washing, and so gratifying, on an individual basis - a sense of freedom from the cruelty of nature. If you work, you can train yourself to become anything.
The social contract is one of mutual pretenses. If someone dares to expose them then, like Socrates, Jesus, or Nietzsche, he is chastised, ridiculed, or put to death.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Last edited by Satyr on Wed Jun 18, 2014 11:05 pm; edited 1 time in total
if you pretend long-enough do you lose yourself in the pretense?
No. Not if you are aware enough to remember that the sheep's skin is still wrapped around you. Do you suppose a Man's psychical reserve, even if strong, can break over time if he spends an inordinate amount of time wearing the skin?
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37123 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
if you pretend long-enough do you lose yourself in the pretense?
No. Not if you are aware enough to remember that the sheep's skin is still wrapped around you. Do you suppose a Man's psychical reserve, even if strong, can break over time if he spends an inordinate amount of time wearing the skin?
Yes, I think it can. More so when he has a family and something invested in the bullshit.
Self-deception is the most vulgar form of hypocrisy.
I've talked about the public identity versus the private one...or character versus personality. I think most people do not feel like there's a difference because for them there is none.
Two possible reasons: When you pretend long enough.... And when you are born with very little character, identity, to begin with, or it is never permitted to develop (retardation).
The stunted or repressed parts do not go away....they bury themselves in the psyche. This is what I mean by socialized schizophrenia.
if you pretend long-enough do you lose yourself in the pretense?
No. Not if you are aware enough to remember that the sheep's skin is still wrapped around you. Do you suppose a Man's psychical reserve, even if strong, can break over time if he spends an inordinate amount of time wearing the skin?
ONce you take on a mode of living enough time, you are tainted by it - or strengthened by it or whatever. If you pretend to be X enough you become X to some degree. It isn't digital. You may, even in extreme cases, have some vestige of what is not the pretense, and you may very well identify this part as the real you - but this identification is no assurance. Mother Night, the novel, goes into this, though it's been decades since I read it. The best way to pretend is to align some of the depths. Actors do this and some of the better ones even find it unpleasant moving back into their 'real lives'. Of course short term very instrumental and limited acts can leave very little trace or none at all. But if you have a role, it has you too.
Worse of course is that most people do not know themselves very well to begin with, and the anxiety that arises when they feel, intuit,notice or have pointed out contradictions between their self-image and how they act or seem is something avoided and fast. Often before the anxiety is noticed.
Most people are muddle of clashing paradigms and senses of themselves, so if they, at 23, take on some role, a role they think is, say, to get ahead in some field, they really have little skill at introspection or even a strongly functioning core from which to evaulate who they are, what they are doing, what they feel and think.
To answer my own question, yes i believe it can. Firstly because man, to some degree, strives to build a defensive barrier between himself and that which threatens to invade his sense of self. The very fact that this barrier is built means that others will do everything they can to make him realize its limitations. The modern Judeo-Christian shaming; demonism. Turning himself against himself until he accepts the breach. How much one is willing to accomplish self-actualization in the social whole determines the strength of this barrier.
I think these movies hook onto unconscious feelings that others are mindless carnivores that view other humans as 'food'. As mere matter. That one is very much alone in a sea of uncaring, near automaton others who will, if one is not on the defensive - which includes a good offense - they will eat you alive. That under the veneer of modern society we are not merely dealing with beasts, but with mechanisms. With dead things that mimic life. And all this is true, of course. And ironically even the primarily mechanistic themselves, since there is a little spark of feeling in them, can get off on the films due to their own fear and denied experience.
Post apocalypse films, with zombies, allow the immediate catharsis of not having to hold up this front - basically people are good, I am not afraid, life is not dangerous, and the whole set of little myths that frankly take a lot of energy to maintain belief in. So bang here we are identifying with a situation where I get to think of most other people as having absolutely no value. The hatred and terror I feel everyday is now clearly warranted and I can act on it. i am not one of the zombies. Which makes me special, a potential hero survivor. Every aggressive feeling I have ever denied has suddenly become a valid, moral tool.
There is a kind of longing to move out of pretense in the catharisis of zombie film watching, but it is also a movement, probably, into other pretenses.
For those people with more than a tiny spark of life, a zombie film matches more openly what they experience every day, though every day life is more like hanging out with radically Pavlovianized mammals than zombies. HOwever there is, always, with the plastic people, that moment when they feel like they can mob you to the ground and eat you. Rarely acted out physically in the West, it certainly happens in social dramas, professionally and in groups in general in a variety of ways. Suddenly group mindless automotons swarm over someone who is different. And in this they get a little of the catharsis, ironically, the person watching a zombie film gets identifying with the remaining sentient humans.
A classic precisely not zombie post-apocalypse film is Quiet Earth. I won't get into the plot since it is hard not to spoiler it.
I think we are getting more dystopian films these days because the last critical decisions are being made. The final mistakes. It make take a great deal of time for the results of these mistakes to manifest completely (or the results may come fast out of some GM or nano tech idiocy), but the turning point has passed.
What stands out to me in the Zombie theme is that the Zombie is still a conscious organism that has been reduced to the most inferior form of human. However, It is still alive to some degree. They remain as a source of conflict to uninfected humans because they still represent something purposeful, something meaningful. This is the human nature of fulfilling existence that modernity sees itself as. Turning its depravity into a strength, or at the very least a poignant feeling.
It's a subconscious way of modernity's desire to manifest its own culture, by depicting it, in some ways, as what it is: diseased, ugly, mindless.
Black mirror type movie. The director creates a world in which people are engulfed in extremely artificial identity. Hints toward the manipulable vunerabilities of it. Display of overall mindless desensitization. Only watched it once five years ago, don't remeber many of the details.
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37123 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
I think Zombies are the perfect symbol for the average Modern. I gave my analysis in my thread UNDERWORLD that also included a variety of other supernatural creatures corresponding to different psychological modern types.
The basis characteristic of a Zombie is his mindlessness, and his insatiable appetites. Both correspond to modernity's thoughtless automatism, the ritualization of behavior, which is called etiquette (civility, politeness), political-correctness, regimentation....and modernity's consumerism (materialism/hedonism). The Zombie's decaying flesh is a symbol of his insubstantial essence, his disconnect from reality, from nature. These are unnatural creatures.
The infection is memetic, whereas in the movie depiction it is transformed into a genetic component that then affects the brain. In reality, modernity, the reverse process happens.
Also, in such dystopic world as the Batman world we see a similar reversal. For example, both Batman and the Joker are the same basic type. They both function outside the memetic formalities.
Batman's masked vigilante character is really his true character. He wears the mask to protect himself from the people he is helping, because they will punish him for having a private and a public self. Bruce Wayne is his persona, his avatar, his public face - it is his social mask.
Joker, on the other hand, has no public/private dichotomy, like the average Joe Batman and he are engaged in protecting/destroying. Joker is the reverse of the common man....he is only a private self with no public personae. He is himself, at all times. This is his madness. This is also why he and Batman can relate. This makes him vulgar and unforgivable.
Joker wants Batman to give up his public image, his fake self.
The message of the movie is to preserve the masks, and to not reveal that you are wearing one...not even at night. This is what is unforgivable about Batman, for the average man of Gotham....he comes out and acts freely, reminding them of the dichotomy, the masks they are wearing in their own daily lives but never drop - not even at night, nuder the cover of darkness; they are thoroughly fake, convinced of the opposite.
The Gotham civilian is the reverse of Joker - he is all public face/persona, no private character. He is shallow in this, and convinced that he is deep and honest.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37123 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Essentially most dystopia novels and almost all dystopic movies are not about some coming future calamity but an indirect way of expressing something about the current (modern) western world.
Dystopias are a reversal of the real, the natural, using hyperbole to clarify what is going on, and symbolism to make it less obvious when censorship is a factor and the audience is not receptive to "bad news" and to criticism that exposes them to an idea that may turn their beliefs on their heads.
Zombies are not caricatures of something supernatural, they are symbolic depictions of a real-life type, being propagated by manmade interventions (techniques and technologies). Those who struggle to survive in the Dystopic landscapes as they are pursued by this hungry creatures, face the same threats: to avoid being infected, consumed, living using clandestine ways, considered ill by those who are dis-eased by a mental virus.
In the final sequal, of the provocative series of Batman, we can see the characters continuing their message of modern culture. "Bane" who is an evolved persona of the "Joker" carries on the tradition of self-hatred and cold and calculating sowing of civilizational destruction. Bane, like the Joker, has no identity and cannot relate to the world in which he was born. However, one should consider Batman his kin in this spiritual respect. Batman, is also an individual of certain self-hatred given that his whole life and strength is absorbed into the modern system that ironically persecutes him, and his redemption is his service to it.
These two characters may be portrayed as opposites from each other, but there is a reason that villains and heros in these films are naturally drawn to each other and reprieve the murder of each other when they are in close contact. They identify with one another's plights of emptiness and rejected lives and in this sense they feel compelled to understand each other.
In the final squeal, Bane is Joker's successor, in that he is significantly stronger and more "seriously" devoted to chaos and misery. The Joker was more intellectually driven to illustrate the psychology of the emptiness of modern culture, while Bane wants only to destroy it without reason. Gotham could be viewed as what Zion in the Matrix was. The last city of human value that desperately stands against the inexorable fate of its own annihilation, a fate that it created for itself.
Batman is not a hero anymore than Bane is a villain. Both Batman and Bane are outcasts. Driven to the edge of nihilism from a culture that is practically nihilistic. The two only follow the logical paths of their own determined purposes towards salvation of their slavish souls. Batman is a product of his decadent time, as is Bane a product of his past of pain and loss. The designations of "hero" and "villain" are somewhat blurred in this film, in the sense that no matter what, all that matters is blind conviction to one's destiny.
The romantic message that is present of course, is that Batman, longs to understand himself through struggle. Noble struggle is exactly what is absent in modernity.
**********************
The revolutionary utopian idealistic attitude that is common among those (normally males) who find themselves rationalizing a new world order, is a product of a slave morality.
The West, and especially America, has harnessed the political Judeo-subjugation psychology and developed the liberal anti-government mindset that permeates the hearts of most militant young people. The hatred of the system, and the subsequent idealization of a "new" system--regardless of its proposed noble state, which is the justification from the anarchist to display some verisimilitude of goodness to cloak the narcissism of their ruthless motives--is how the anarchist reveals their true dependence upon the system to validate their worth.
It is the psychological impact of the American roots which originate from oppression, that it has adaptively, like the Jews, harnessed the political constitution of the "honorable spirit" of what it means to be oppressed, making their inferiority into a virtue.
hence, the anarchist is a kind of neo-Judeo-christian, in that he seeks to transcend himself, his slavishness, in the eyes of God (I.E government, or the "system), and be reborn into a new God or society that is succeeded by pure Marxist communal cooperation and free from conflict.
His hatred of society or government, is spiritually a hatred of the world, and a desire to abolish nature and be thrust into a more forgiving world where his nihilism can be abated. To cleanse himself, of the "evils" of this world, makes him naturally Christian. The anarchist uses the very sanctioned principles and codes of the system he desires to thwart for another system, which points to his ambivalence of being dependent upon it.
He has no clue that his hatred for the system, is exactly what makes him a product of it. Moreover, he fails to come to terms with the historical influence of what "anti-government" means. That democracy is quintessentially against government and for the collective opinion of a body of individuals.
I think in Dark Knight Rises, Joker has the same problem that Tyler_Durden has here on this forum. In the movie, Joker wanted to unveil and provoke that inner animal of the modernist. And he became frustrated at the end of the movie when they just wouldn't follow along with his schemes.
Joker found it very difficult to plunge Gotham City into chaos. In fact, it was Bane who succeeded in this, where Joker failed, because Bane held the whole city hostage.
Joker had a different presumption about human nature. He, mistakingly, thought that people would descend into chaos easily. But it is not so easy.
With the modernist, the civilized manimal, they resist chaos very strongly. They cling to order. Which is why they cling to batman's image.
Chaos is much more difficult to create and spread fear, as Joker initially thought. It takes work to provoke chaos. Joker seems to have realized this frustration at the end of the movie. It wasn't as easy as he first suspected.
Perhaps the biggest difference between Bane and Joker, is that Joker didn't want to destroy Gotham necessarily, but rather play in it and joke around. Joker didn't mind the death of manimals. Joker is about having fun. He has this in common with the average Gotham citizen. In the way of "having fun", both Joker and the modernist share that bond together.
The difference is that the modernist sees Joker's idea of fun as "crazy, insane".
Black mirror type movie. The director creates a world in which people are engulfed in extremely artificial identity. Hints toward the manipulable vunerabilities of it. Display of overall mindless desensitization. Only watched it once five years ago, don't remeber many of the details.
This movie was poorly directed. Very Bad acting. I saw it once. never again.
However, this is perhaps an extreme consequence of the entertainment industry. Neil postman might be relevant in terms of how effective the Huxlean pleasure principle might be in regards to the mind control of entertainment.The only thing i appreciated about this movie is that it accurately showed the close relationship of sex and entertainment and its mind-numbing effect as well as its overall place as a value commodity. Asses, tits, sexual innuendos, mindless primitivism.
**************************
The reason why abstract thought has been superseded by scientific progressivism, belittled by hedonistic culture or altogether forgotten has to do with its nature of universality. The practice of philosophy denotes a grand flexibility to account for nature as a whole, as where the times of specialization remain stunted in narrow parameters of intellectual quality.
Analytic philosophy, like surrealism in art, was the turning point in which conceptual reflection became a mode of productivity or performativity in deconstructing the essence of ideals into empty scientific value. Thought itself is becoming absorbed by the system of commodities.
For example, a computer accumulates a vast storage of information and knowledge and then applies such information or knowledge to methodologies that allow it to either increase its performance or its efficiency. If the computer were to posses the introspective capacity to understand what such knowledge means to itself in comparison to elements in its own identity or environment, it would begin to malfunction as the very act of cognitive reflection requires a kind of steadfast discipline that would result in the stagnation of the machine’s performance. The information age of modern society works in a very similar way.
The sheer accessibility and abundance of ideas and knowledge produces in the consciousness a mechanism of performativity. To appropriate, apply, and increase efficiency. No reflection or wisdom is gained, only the usefulness of the ideas to enhance survival. The transhuman prophecies of artificial convergence of physical with material, is only part of the issue. The socio-collective consciousness results in the state of the singularity, and this can occur from the interconnectivity of minds with the exchange value and production of ideas and knowledge.
The Singularity is not intelligent, but primitive. Its success depends upon minds being connected to a functionality of performance, which is not indicative of intellect but of instinct. The lower the awareness of the collective consciousness is, the more malleable minds are to being usurped into submission and the more cohesive its harmony will be and the less chance it will have of breaking down. If one were to consider the gross mediums of social networking, one may gain a better idea of how our sensual dependence upon immediate interaction feeds off the instinctual proclivity to primal cooperation.
The modern dystopian anguish first begins as a conditioned mentality through years or even generations of mimetic social engineering and begins to validate itself through cultural expressions eventually leading to annexation of a collective whole and finding dormancy in artistic norms and morays. The whole then becomes directed to see it as the current environment that dominates them, positively, in such a way to make it attractive or comforting. This establishes an equilibrium, they then make peace with it through rosy imagery, and than imagine ways to live with it.
Or they try to imagine ways to abolish it. They reduce the very idea of self or man to a purely cooperative functional entity with consciousness only serving to either enhance or perpetuate the whole. This abolition of the world must first begin with the abolition of the self through an enlightenment of nihilism. Where the self, the comparison of the self to the world; the link must be severed and only then will the individual be conditioned enough to act without thinking, becoming pure productivity.
The modern messianic leader must eradicate and wean his followers from their dependence on the idea of existing to serve a purpose, to existing to be a purpose. To be a means, a selfless conduit of utility for the leader himself who is the construct of what houses those conduits. Instead of trying to teach them to overcome it, to surpass it or to improve themselves in comparison to their world, they teach only to submit to it without recourse and become a part of their time and place. The self must be dominated into oblivion.
The Tyler Durden archetype seeks to lower the ideal of man to the lowest common denominator. To deduct the idea of identity and replace it with a productive operational organism that is more relentless and mindlessly industrious. Whether the New World Order is consummated or not, matters little, because there is no realistic way to know for any degree of certainty what would constitute the precise achievement of that aim. What matters is that he take what is already dead or dying in the modern man and turn it into a strength. To guide the wandering and aimless masses into a goal and funnel their residual, however listless, energies. To direct the death of the modern man into the world he longs to see dead. If one part of the psyche cannot overcome the other, than the disparity must remain fractured or merge with itself to make the psychological conflict useful to some end.
The rise of dystopian genre represents globalization and the christian "end times" prophesies. Civilization has spread throughout the globe. There is no "wild" territory to retreat to. There is no place of lawlessness. There is only society and increased pressure on socialization.
Man is expendable within society and civilization. Males are pushed out. The dystopian genre connects with the modern man and his mental slavery. That is why these films grow increasingly popular. The Matrix in particular was a breakthrough.
Compare The Matrix franchise with Star Wars. What's the difference? In Star Wars, a positive, upbeat storyline is favored. But where is the new environment? In space, with frontiers. Even in Star Wars, the "evil empire" is globalizing, not just earth and the solar system, but the entire galaxy. The rebels, the "good guys", are resisting the empire and its totalitarianism.
Dystopia connects with the modern female, through fear. So it appeals to male slavery to sociology, and female fear of lawlessness. When anarchy descends, the females lose their protections. So females feel that dystopias are part of a horror film genre, as they are. Take note of the male, female relationship of the protagonists in Fight Club. Tyler Durden represents the heroic modern man. Karla represents his prime choice of modern woman. Both are painted as degenerates, in a way.
"Dropouts", dropping out of the system. Rebelling and resisting society.
.jpg)
