Signs and Signifiers of The Spectacular Times

Standing on the subway at two a.m., I see two movie posters side by side and I begin to sense the unsettling nature of the current zeitgeist. Call them Signs and Signifiers of the Spectacular Times.

I first saw the poster for this movie:

And to it’s right, I saw the poster for this one:

The tag lines–or maybe I should say command lines–much like the dire, bellicose, “us versus them” themes of the two movies seem to fit together uncomfortably well.

All bets are off. Trust No One.

Even the feel of the posters work together. Sand and dust. Ominous, storm clouds. A ravaged city landscape in the distance. In the first poster, the urban tomb lays in front of the heavily armed protagonist. In the second, it lays behind and around our warrior protagonists.

In each poster, we see the obvious physical signifiers of the illusory “clash of civilizations” many of us have lived through in our minds, just as we’ve dutifully entrained ourselves to. Resident evil gives us the symbols of “western decadence” (Las Vegas), western hopes of liberty (the semi-submerged faux Statue of Liberty at Vegas) and western governance (the solar phallus of the Washington monument), as well as the western revolutionary and counter-revolutionary faiths (the Eiffel Tower). On the other hand, we have the symbols of the mysterious, inscrutable and “backwards,” to western social programming, opposing civilization: the Middle East (represented by faux Sphinx and Great Pyramid). Similarly, the poster for The Kingdom shows us the embodiment of western inclusiveness and technological advancement in the image of a black man (Jamie Foxx) and a woman (Jennifer Gardner) leading the charge with sophisticated weaponry while the white guy stands behind in the distance (and, yes, this symbolism can be read differently than the producers might like you to). The “enemy,” meanwhile, remains just as inscrutable and mysterious as in the Resident Evil poster by not being present in the main picture at all. You’ll get the point, nonetheless, if you notice that Jamie Foxx’s gun, despite the cropping of the picture, points straight down at the silhouette of the Saudi capital at the bottom of the poster.

Is it just a coincidence that these movies are coming out so close together? Resident Evil opens on September 21st, 2007. The Kingdom opens a week later on September 28, 2007. What fortuitous timing for these two releases, what with all the pre-false-flag/ artificial terror attack chatter we’ve heard all summer long from the likes of Deutschland–excuse me–Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff’s gut, plus the talk that the psychopaths in charge over here may plan an attack on the psychopaths in charge over there in Iran as a special 9/11 anniversary “gift” to us. Either way, a group of psychopaths will win and lots of innocent people will die or be further enslaved on both sides of the ocean.

From Barnett R. Rubin at Informed Comment Global Affairs :

Today I received a message from a friend who has excellent connections in Washington and whose information has often been prescient. According to this report, as in 2002, the rollout will start after Labor Day, with a big kickoff on September 11. My friend had spoken to someone in one of the leading neo-conservative institutions. He summarized what he was told this way:

They [the source's institution] have “instructions” (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don’t think they’ll ever get majority support for this–they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is “plenty.”

Of course I cannot verify this report. But besides all the other pieces of information about this circulating, I heard last week from a former U.S. government contractor. According to this friend, someone in the Department of Defense called, asking for cost estimates for a model for reconstruction in Asia. The former contractor finally concluded that the model was intended for Iran.

And that little computer-enhanced exercise in anti-Iran psy-ops, 300, just got released on dvd this past month. Fancy, that.

Then, of course, there’s the recent, mysterious $900 million dollar bet on a stock market crash in the third week of September, the same time-frame for the releases of Resident Evil:Extinction and The Messenger. Curious. That stock bet by the way, is also oddly reminiscent of the put options placed on American Airlines stock, options that were to be called in on September 11, 2001 when an American airlines flight happened to conveniently slam into the World Trade Center.

But before you get all paranoid, wait. Still yourself. Breathe in. Exhale. Let go.

The doom and gloom is not all inevitable, not even at this moment. It can be stopped.

A Primer on Our Spectacular Times, Courtesy a Dead, Bored French Guy

If you’re already part of the choir, you’re probably following these fleeting thoughts pretty easily and with an awareness of where they’re going. If you’ve stumbled upon this post from a random internet search or the like, you might assume what I’ve been hinting at is something pretty insane. Either way, you’d be well served by making acquaintance with a dead Frenchman, Guy Debord, the first person to analyze The Spectacle comprehensively.

What exactly is the Spectacle I’m talking about? Well, here’s as good a summation as any. From Debord’s final work on the topic, the Comments [emphasis added]:

In 1967, in a book entitled The Society of the Spectacle, I showed what the modern spectacle was already in essence: the autocratic reign of the market economy which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of government which accompanied this reign…

I’ll do my best to translate his quote for you. We currently reside in a world that is ruled by structures entirely dependent on commodity economics, that includes industries, such as the “entertainment” industry, of which the movies and the “news” are just different flavors. These structures also includes national and international corporations, traditional, national governments and the rival cliques of powerful elites entrenched within them. Each individual existing under the sphere of influence of these groups also end up serving the commodity structure, as well as becoming a commodity within it. In order for this system and its interdependent power structures to survive, it must expand. It must produce more commodities: things to be bought and sold. Its greatest power seems a magkical one, that of conjuring. For it is by producing images, and spectacles for individual consumption that our identities are reshaped to more fully serve this commodity-driven, market society. The ethereal– signs and images and ideas or “memes,” as our cultural hipsters would have it– are marketed, sold and consumed. The “idea” of a “War on Terror,” the idea of “market economies” and “globalism” or “progress” or “Christian family values:” these seldom are conjured, disseminated or consumed by themselves because the logic of the system can only value them insofar as they support the commodity-based social structure. The spectacle is a system in which any values other than that of selling and buying is transformed into a “ghost,” a shadow of itself that only exists to serve the Spectacle. Thus we get more and more spectacles and commodities of freedom like patriotic t-shirts, Toby Keith albums and sentimental 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina anniversary specials on TV while, at the same time, we get less and less genuine freedom.

But I’m getting ahead of things, sorry. You’ll appreciate the analysis of Hegelian dialectics at work Debord gives us next [emphasis added]:

In 1967, I distinguished two rival and successive forms of spectacular power, the concentrated and the diffuse. Both of them floated above real society, as its goal and its lie. The former, favoring the ideology condensed around a dictatorial personality, had accomplished the totalitarian counter-revolution, fascist as well as Stalinist. The latter, driving wage-earners to apply their freedom of choice to the vast range of new commodities now on offer, had represented the Americanization of the world, a process which in some respects frightened but also successfully seduced those countries where it had been possible to maintain traditional forms of bourgeois democracy. Since then a third form has been established, through the rational combination of these two, and on the basis of a general victory of the form which showed itself stronger: the diffuse. This is the integrated spectacle, which has since tended to impose itself globally.

I’m suddenly reminded of Frank Zappa’s astute statement that politics is the entertainment wing of industry.

But back to our regularly scheduled essay.

What I’m using the words of this very brilliant, tragic and dead Frenchman to tell you is that there is an integration between the machinations of the political players working towards war and the spectacular entertainments presented to us by Hollywood.

Please don’t think I’m talking about a “Them,” in the shape of shadowy cigar chomping white guys in some darkly-lit room somewhere, centrally controlling everything and everyone. Not saying those white guys don’t exist, but no one faction of them controls everything, nor is likely to, though Something[1], seems in charge.

Here’s Debord again:

The integrated spectacle shows itself to be simultaneously concentrated and diffuse, and ever since the fruitful union of the two has learnt to employ both these qualities on a grander scale. Their former mode of application has changed considerably. As regards concentration, the controlling center has now become occult never to be occupied by a known leader, or clear ideology.

For those who have come to recognize that W. is not really in charge, but is merely a middle manager, the representation of a leader, that’s no surprise. Still, Debord’s analysis may start to clear things up for “rational” people who keep looking for a a logical reason why the name, rules and purpose of the game appear to keep shifting.

Continuing [emphasis added]:

[O]n the diffuse side, the spectacle has never before put its mark to such a degree on almost the full range of socially produced behavior and objects. For the final sense of the integrated spectacle is this–that it has integrated itself into reality to the same extent as it was describing it, and that it was reconstructing it as it was describing it. As a result, this reality no longer confronts the integrated spectacle as something alien. When the spectacle was concentrated, the greater part of surrounding society escaped it; when diffuse, a small part; today, no part. The spectacle has spread itself to the point where it now permeates reality. It was easy to predict in theory what has been quickly and universally demonstrated by practical experience of economic reason’s relentless accomplishments: that the globalisation of the false was also the falsification of the globe.

Beyond a legacy of old books and old buildings, still of some significance but destined to continual reduction and, moreover, increasingly highlighted and classified to suit the spectacle’s requirements, there remains nothing, in culture or in nature, which has not been transformed, and polluted, according to the means and interests of modern industry. Even genetics has become readily accessible to the dominant social forces.

Spectacular government[...]now possesses all the means necessary to falsify the whole of production and perception[...]

The society whose modernization has reached the stage of the integrated spectacle is characterized by the combined effect of five principal features: incessant technological renewal; integration of state and economy; generalized secrecy, unanswerable lies; an eternal present.

In such a spectacular world as ours, it’s naive not to see that Resident Evil and The Messenger, are far from just movies. Call them promotional tie-ins, another part of the coordinated marketing campaign for the greater product being sold with regards to Iran and beyond. You could easily call that product Walmart World. It’s a world where all rival cultures have been hollowed out, emptied of their spirit, and commodified; a world where we can buy and sell whatever we like, so long as it is spiritless and false, including the shadow of ourselves; a world where you can do anything you like, except choose not to buy or choose to organize outside the approved market channels; a world where the only communities are commercial and industrial ones, serving the state and industry first, never individuals; a world where you can only work for the store, buy from the store (regardless of the currency or its future replacement) and sleep in the store, because you can never leave the store; a world where you’re always answerable to the managers. A place where your managers are always answerable to their managers–chairmen, experts, theorists, technicians, scientific and military advisors; and these folks in turn, answer to amorphous and unseen forces, abstract concepts and, ultimately the Spectacle itself, an egregore, a tulpa: a hungry ghost. You could just as easily call such a world The Cube. Or the Total Spectacle.

Just Because Things Look Bad, Doesn’t Mean It’s a Done Deal

That horror-show world isn’t here just yet.

Debord apparently disagreed. He saw the world of the Total Spectacle as already fully here and utterly victorious,with no chance of overturning, much less transforming, it. Perhaps that’s why he, like Hunter S. Thompson more recently, committed suicide. Unless, of course, suicide was committed on these two men, not by them.[2]

I do not see things so darkly. And it’s for the same reason that Freeman Fly can remain so upbeat. Just look at how much time and money the forces of the Spectacle must utilize when performing their lunatic conjurations, how much energy and effort they must devote to selling each and every one of us on their future Total Spectacle. That’s far from the kind of effort expended on something that’s already a done deal.

Part of that effort is selling you on seeing and thus entraining to the totalitarian warmongering and suggestions of apocalyptic inevitability found in Resident Evil and The Messenger. Refuse to see these movies and speak to your friends and neighbors about why they should, too. But don’t stop at refusing to consume the two films above. Refuse to consume the parallel war-marketeering being conducted by politicians and the press, no matter what party “brand” they represent. And refuse to consume the “market logic” that drives the Spectacle. And little, by little, see if you can learn to cease identifying with the logic, the signs and signifiers of these Spectacular Times. Because this stuff isn’t just entertainment. If any of it ever was, it sure ain’t anymore.

Two Lonely Footnote

[1] Perhaps that something is the Spectacle itself, which functions as if it is an autonomous entity. This is not much different from and is perhaps the same as what is referred to as an egregore in the Western occult tradition and as a tulpa in Tibetan Buddhism. Perhaps we should call it The Spectre-cal.
[2]The case for murder has been put forth with regards to Hunter S. Thompson and I’m surprised I’ve never seen it in relation to death of DeBord. Maybe that’s because after the failed revolutions of the late 60’s, the latter refused to participate in the spectacle, with one notable exception. Or maybe it’s just because DeBord always seemed dour, unlike the fun-loving, wild-living doctor of gonzo journalism.