The Rape of the Cosmos VII
Barbie the Commodity: You don’t own me. You own nothing. Get your hands off me, you creep!
Bella the Class: Don’t worry. You can still watch me consume and be happy.
Interpreting Barbie is not something I should be doing, I know. It’s just advertising it. I didn’t see it, at least. But the pr is the real show, the one everyone sees. It is built as a pretext for readings of the glib film school film buff kind that had a cultural sequence all out of order: the readings debuted pre-satirized in spectacle (as the butt of jokes in old school series like Law and Order) and only later took themselves seriously (in infantile spook rags like The New Inquiry).
But these half-educated, fan reactions have taken their place as a substitute for possession of all kinds, including cognitive. They’re the relations to the commodity forms of your stolen life that are permitted under the new regime where you own nothing. In few, then, Barbie is this new regime’s courtiers’ manifesto. Barbie got famous as a doll, a mass produced piece of plastic sold with a trademarked image that provoked affects. Lives of men women and children are consumed in her production. In the ancien mop, consumers buy her, reacquiring a perverted drained empty pacifier form of what has been alienated and killed in her production. But NOW, the movie delivers the Klaus Schwab announcement that no, no, not so fast. You don’t own Barbie. The trademarked image is bloating and becoming the Cosmos. You are a trespasser here. How dare you think you own Barbie, that you can use Barbie. You own nothing. The commodity, capital, has the rights you thought belonged to you, the human citizen. She is the master race. Immortal. Perfect. You don’t play with her, you are her slaves, to be sacrificed to her.
The Matrix vision of the pod battery people has it all twisted but it had the magnetism of partial truth.. One can think of this Capital Cosmos as a huge sort of dialysis machine, that has replaced your healthy kidneys and isn’t doing what they did.
So it happens that Barbie Movie is the latest stage of this development of post-humanism that I wrote about in my first bloggy thing: The Passion of the Corporation, thoughts on Schindler’s List and the Passion of the Christ. The apotheosis of capital is traced. Barbie takes this development further. But I am guessing Poor Things will prove a kind of footnote to it, appendix, detour, a Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead interlude in the general sequence.
ANYWAY, I’m going to quote myself later because all this is related to the pseudo-critiques mentioned in the last substacks, and to the reproduction, and subtle alterations, of the worldviews represented by the vying explanations that Rational Naomi is trying to reterritorialize and stabilize. And I am referring to for example her new assertion — because she used to talk in a relatively serious way about class war, in euphemisms — that imperial policy is never carrying out class war as such tho due to structural conditions the gains and losses are divided by class, as policy is driven by short term needs of whichever industrial sector bribes enough politicians to get their stuff done. She has asserted even that the overthrow of Allende was not anti-communist imperial praxis, not part of anything like a cold war (which now she treats as the delusion of paranoid illiberals) but just business undertaken wholly to effect the acquisition of copper by some US manufacturers. I know you can see the escher’like irony of all this ferocious denial of plotting ending in a conspiracy of copper-buyers and ‘corruption,’ masquerading as Kissingerian Statesmanly Strategy and imperial and class war, in other words, she has landed in the classic worldview of petty bourgeois libertarians. (She has also adopted a sheeple bashing elitism she didn’t used to exhibit at all, au contraire, but now she takes it as certain that the popularity of a product like Rogan or Wolf proves its perversity and fascism. The precise opposite is obvious to us, the popularity is due to the magnetism of the shreds of truth that are increasingly monopolized, in spectacle, by these vats of shit.)
Yours truly, 2005:
"It should be noted, if only in passing, that Mr. Spielberg has this year delivered the most astounding one-two punch in the history of American cinema. Jurassic Park, now closing in on billion-dollar grosses, is the biggest movie moneymaker of all time. Schindler's List, destined to have a permanent place in memory, will earn something better." - Janet Maslin
Better than profit?
What in heaven could it be?
A very 20th century sentiment, that. Maslin couldn't name anything specific that could be better than profit, but there lingered a notion something might exist.
That intuition hasn't occurred to the producers of The Passion of the Christ, who, amidst the 'controversy,' offered only one single and incontrovertible justification of the film, proof of the film's holy worthiness, trumping all objections, and that is that its made this staggering profit.
Both filmmakers, Spielberg and Gibson, director-adaptors of underlying
material of more or less (or rather much and very much less) historical content, who are also heads of the producing corporations, claimed and were awarded special status for their expensive, profitable fictions, which were received by critics largely unchallenged not as profit-generating business ventures but acts of reverence and historical duty, and both films were celebrated for box office success as if profit were a symptom of and a divine reward for artistic altruism, for sincerity of mission. The immense profits of both films vindicate them aesthetically and morally, bear witness to their virtue and at the same time somehow prove they were made for some reason -any reason - other than generating said profits.
[…]Q: WHAT IS BETTER THAN PROFIT?
A: TAX-FREE PROFIT.
Both fictional commercial culture products - Passion and Schindler - based on underlying material purporting to be factual (in the former case unreasonably, in the latter absurdly), were taken almost universally as peculiarly relevant beyond the enclosed bubble of Hollywood make-believe, penetrating the outer sphere of the making of historical and religious belief. Both invited professional journalists and commentators to adopt the critical stance of the historian and political analyst rather than that of the discerning elite among popcorn munching escapists.
A rather surprisingly large minority of usually sycophantic critics condemned and dismiss Gibson's film for being exploitative commercial nonsense, and far too violent, while a much smaller group of dissenters condemned Schindler for being exploitative commercial nonsense and not nearly violent enough. 'The feel good movie about the feel bad event of the century,' Terrence Rafferty wrote of Speilberg's contribution to the cinematic Holocaust in the New Yorker.
Now Gibson has delivered his eccentric addition to the cinematic Bible, the feel bad movie about the feel good news of Christian history.
At a critical historical moment for democracy and international legal order, which saw the launching of the 'New Military Humanitarianism' in foreign policy following hard upon the reunification of Germany and the commencement of the replay of the 1941 pulverisation of Yugoslavia, few critics wondered at Spielberg's intention to comfort and soothe his audience with a Holocaust movie wherein all the protagonists (petit bourgeois to a man) survive, dramatizing the conflict between the Good Nazi Entrepreneur (Schindler) and the Bad Nazi Bureaucrat/Soldier (Goeth) in which the former triumphs over the latter with the help of Mahatma Gandhi disguised as an archetypal 'Jewish Accountant' - absolving capitalism of all responsibility for fascism and Auschwitz.
Many mainstream reviewers now, on the other hand, are puzzled as to why Gibson has chosen, when another merciless torrent of violence has been unleashed across the earth in defence of profit disguised as a 'war on evil,' to enrage his audience over 'ancient history.'