Media, Technology and Society

Welcome to the Sh*tabyss...

It is no secret that many Canadians dearly love their Trailer Park Boys, and I'm a HUGE fan. Indeed, there is no trash like Canadian trash.

 

I can't wait for this movie to come out....if for no other reason than director and visionary founder Mike Clattenburg's unsubstantiated claim that "it's a cinematic experience," noting that there's a "certain charm" to the series' cheap video quality that fans will still want to see writ large. (from CTV). So true. There is something very lovely about cheap video quality.

He notes that low-rent Canadian screen classic from 1970, Don Shebib's Goin' Down the Road, was shot in a similar social realist style. Come to think of it, there are other similarities in its story of a pair of Cape Breton roustabouts who decide to drive to Toronto in their beat-up Chevy looking for a better life.

"We didn't want to spend hours lighting stuff. . .we consciously didn't want to get too glamorous,'' Clattenburg adds. "(But still it's) very worthy of 10 Canadian dollars!'' (CTV)

Indeed. No point in spending lots of money on fancy lighting. Well said. Lets hope this populist preference for precociously degenerate filmmaking invades other genres...

Film Review: Supersize Me!

I've always laughed at the apparent frivolity of lawsuits from overweight people who have eaten a regular diet of fatty, salty, sugary food for years upon end and finally decided that it was McDonalds fault that they ended up as they have.

It seems ludicrous. In Mcdonalds defence against one such case, it argued that the plaintifs should have reasonably known about the overall unhealthiness of their food. Atleast their lawyers are honest!

Ultimately, the judge in this particular case decided in favour of McDonalds, accepting the defendents argument that the plaintiffs had not proven that they had suffered severe health problems as a result of eating McDonalds food.

Enter Morgon Spurlock's quest to find out whether eating McDonalds food could actually cause severe health problems.

Over the course of 30 days, the perfectly healthy vegan-fed Spurlock goes from 185 pounds with excellent cholesterol and liver quality to a 220 pound, liver-damaged, sick, moody, food-addicted wreck.

Over the course of the documentary, we understand just why the average American person's lifestyle is essentially toxic. The average American walks a stunning  average of only 2500 steps a day (Spurlocks pre-binge average was 5000+ thanks to living in new york where you can actually walk to where you need) as a result of a transportation and employment environment which acts as a restraint on easy opportunities for exercise.

As the film progresses, Morgan gets more and more sick. By Day 18, his liver has become effused with fat and his doctors warn that unless he gives up his diet he may suffer long term health problems. That's EIGHTEEN DAYS. Some people, approx 22% of McDonalds customers are 'super-heavy-users' and consume McDonalds food more than 3 or 4 times a week. Its just stunning to watch someone get that sick on food that we never quite suspected of being quite as bad as it is.

The film explores a variety of issues that are connected to McDonalds and American's health. It also examines the link between the sad diets that kids are served in elementary schools and the connection between the corporate interests behind them. It asks why congress has never challenged the oligopolistic power of the (unhealth) food industry with strong legislation, given the mounting evidence about that industry's culpability and duplicity in America's obesity epidemic.

All in all, a fine documentary, and one of a growing number that demonstrate a willingness to critically examine parts of mainstream American culture (which, in the case of McDonalds, is now mainstream global culture) and the effects it has on the people who live in it. Documentaries with actual meaning and relevance appear to be experiencing a resurgence given the tremendous commercial success of Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine and F911.

Ultimately, after watching this film, the question of how much responsibility companies such as McDonalds bear collectively in the obesity epidemic becomes more clear. Its not so simple to say, 'the individual's responsible'. McDonalds has tremendous power through billion dollar advertising budgets to ensure its messages about what constitutes a tasty meal supercedes the meagre competition from wholesome food retailers and advocates (surgeon general etc).

I for one, have eaten my last meal from McDonalds thank you very much....no thanks to you Beyonce and JT!

Check out Morgan's blog here for more...

Fahrenheit 9-11 and Hegemony: Is the Man really that Ugly?

Why yes he is. But he'd rather you didn't know.

I just saw Fahrenheit 9-11 on the 25th, like so many across Canada and the Continentual US. This film struck me as few political films can. First of all, there is something about viewing a film based on real events and personalities that is more gripping and moving than watching a film, even one based on "a true story". Documentaries are fun stuff, especially if they concern the gruesome politics of the most powerful man in the most powerful nation on earth. It would be a distortion to say this film is as George Bush senior calls it a "personal attack on his son". Its far broader than that, and indicts not just one man, but the system that produces him and many others like him.

The most powerful statement (among so many) occured at the end, when Moore refers to the powers that keep the masses ignorant and apathetic. It is their ignorance and consent which keeps the heirarchal nature of our society intact.

I think Moore was making reference to Gramsci's notion of ideology hegemony. Ideology is here defined as "meaning making in the service of power". So hegemony is a way of meaning making that carries with it a politics of domination. It is the theory that the rulers of society maintain their rule by winning over the commonsensical understandings held by the masses (i.e. in F9-11 the woman who responds to Lila Lipscomb's greif over the death of her son by telling her to blame "al quada" epitomizes this).

These four elements to ideological hegemony help to explain its workings:

Before we get into them, some notes from a professor at my school who provided some excellent examples of hegemony in action (professor Robert Hackett)

"Hegemony tends to neutralize antagonisms by redefining them. There is a difference of interests between people who benefitted from [British Columbia Premier Gordon] Campbells tax cuts vs. people who have to pay more for public services. The idea of hegemony would be to suggest that conflict is neutralized and redefined, i.e. "this is necessary to grow the British Columbia economy". It might interpret differences of interest as differences in "lifestyle". If succesful, hegemony naturalizes existing social relationships, advertisements in the media, as "the way things are". There's no alternative. Even though these conditions were created. They are transformed into the status of an internal truth. I think its not necessarily intentional. The idea of ex-nomination...meaning a failure to "mean" something....There is no party that calls itself the "capitalist party": they all are. In Hartley's 'Understanding News', there was the tabloid headline "Senator and Blonde in Crash". Hartley says women tend to be defined by their looks while men are defined by their job or position." The senator is implied as a man, and the blonde is clearly a woman. But could it have been a female senator with a blonde man? Clearly not, but why?

he continues,

"There used to be no name for "sexual harassment". That's a concept that took ideological or counter-hegemonic work to become a thing or issue. Hegemony generalizes particular interests of the elite class and transforms them into the interests of the whole society. From the particular to the general, the old moniker "What's good for GM is good for America" comes to mind.

The Three Aspects of Hegemony:

1. It is Lived Practice. As thinking, knowing human subjects we enter into this process, we are complicit or not in this practical effort. This is not "brainwashing", but the acceptance of a practical way of organizing our lives and activities that just so happens to conform to elite interests.

2. It is common sense. A more or less unconscious way of understnadin gthe world, a space that allows competing views within limits. It implies that acceptable understandings are not limited to narrow partisan boundaries, but that there are nonetheless limits, outside of which, one appears to be a radical. Chomsky overlaps here, in that he theorized that US political debate taks place within just such a boundary of "common sense". For example, it is acceptable dissent to criticize US involvement in Iraq as posing to great a cost for its benefits in the "war on terror". It is unacceptable dissent to question the motives for ever going there in the first place, and cast light on the economic incentives for the invasion, i.e. questioning whether "bringing freedom and democracy" to Iraq are really the true cause for the invasion.

3. It is always contested. Hegemony is not a monolithic force. The power bloc as Gramsci describes the elite, cannot be assured of success in winning the consent of the social order. News media and other actors in the meaning-making stage, do occasionally generate real, critical dissent that effectivelly challenges the assumptions and power relations upon which the whole ideological structure relies. So to the extent that consent is won, Hegemony survives, and to the extent that it fails, or when Counter-hegemonic understandings arise, then a new fight for 'common sense' takes place, with new boundaries drawn. For example, the latest battle in terms of gender has hit a rut (in my view). Women have since the 1970s adopted a "radical" politics of fairness and equality, and won important victories over the language of gender (among other things). For example, most people don't refer to "mankind" or "man" and refer instead to "humanking". However, most economic and political elites are still....men. And the statistics haven't really changed all that much since 1990. See Statistics Canada Figures on Employment/Gender Gap or CBC columnist Georgie Binks insightful column. So these battles still rage, to put it pointedly.

Lastly, to link hegemony back to Fahrenheit 9-11, I believe this film, while populist admittedly, and full of emotional, documentary dramatics, is still a valid and intensely powerful peice of counter-hegemonic pop culture.

The idea that thousands (hopefully millions) of people will be leaving theatres in the US questioning their status as "subjects", as essentially "sheep" who'se consent has (or not) has helped (or hindered) the ability of these these elites to remain in power can only have enormous political ramifications.

Just reading some of the responses by fans who have seen the film at michaelmoore.com is really impressive. Audience members in traditionally conservative towns vividly describe the sense that they are "not alone", that the common sense of the conservative/patriotic/pro-bush/religious power bloc has had its feathered ruffled. This is a powerful thing. A whole lot of people have been given a tremendous vocabulary for debate in a way, viewing the "independent" media, just doesn't enable.

I loved the scene in F9-11, where Fox News is the only station pronouncing Bush a winner. But even if Bush hadn't won, I doubt Gore would have been reversed history substantially. The footage of him stamping down on the black Florida voters (who protested the fact that they were disenfranchised) in Congress was extremely disappointing and revealing.

And the whole US congress is virtually all white men between the age of 40 and 65? What is this? How can they speak for the vast populations of blacks, hispanics and other minorities in US society? What an obscene political system. Did Brown vs. Board of Education take place in the last century, or was that just for fun....?