syriana
** spoiler warning **
(seriously, consider yourself warned)
Just back from seeing Syriana. My body is tight as a spring. I feel my chest has been squeezed so tight, for so long, it will never return to its usual plasticity. My jaw is tight and I find my teeth grinding against each other. And my brow. My brow is so furrowed my eyes are almost buried. I realized when the movie finally ended that I'd been sitting on the edge of my seat for about two hours of the two-hour-and-fifteen minute film -- next to Dreadlock, who could barely contain her boredom. That's it. I'm done with Dreadlock. We have nothing to offer each other and I'd much prefer time alone than time wasted with her.
Syriana. Such a tricky, complicated, brilliant movie (still a movie, still Hollywood, still, don't worry, in the end it more or less works out for the insanely attractive, straight, white, heterosexual family) -- I noticed driving home that I'm angry. Deeply angry. Impotently angry. It's the source of the clenching, squeezing, constriction in my whole body. This movie is brilliant and we see our government, more than wedded to big-oil, more than nefariously orchestrating the flow and flux of power in the middle-east, we see, I am sure, a pretty fair depiction of exactly how disgusting and repulsive and deeply fucked up and machiavellian it all is. And we all sit in the fucking upscale, white, yuppie, McMennamin's theatre, and we nod and gasp at all the right moments and we see the parallel between the George Clooney character and the kid who becomes a suicide bomber, we see them as the pure-hearted martyrs that they are, we see the only three good people die and the world is left with only the most wicked and the most stupid, the drones, the lackeys, and the powerbrokers, left to the scheming and shmoozing and the picking one another off left and right, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
And we get up and walk out to our CARS which run on the OIL that's at the heart of all this CORRUPTION and MAYHEM and VIOLENCE and we drive to our comfortable, American homes. Why are we allowed to see this movie?? Because it won't make one goddamn bit of difference. If every man, woman and child in this country watches this movie, believes it to be an accurate depiction of the business of oil and power in the world, and recognizes that we all, every last one of us, has blood on our hands -- even if that happens, it won't change a thing. We are too comfortable. We are too fat on our comfort. And we've been made stupid by our comfort, too stupid to care.
Yes, yes, we live in the greatest nation, the most free nation, free enough to let us see this movie in which our own government is depicted as the most unscrupulous, greedy, oil-hungry, murderous, back-stabbing, power-monger imaginable. But the fact of this great freedom is exactly what renders the information in this movie impotent. That's what is so enraging. It is a movie. It is entertainment. We are allowed to see it, in the name of entertainment. If we stood up and accused our government of actually behaving this way, we'd be called crazy, cynical, hysterical, terrorist. Why should we think our government doesn't actually behave this way? Why is it cynical, crazy, hysterical to think the government behaves this way now, when we can look at declassified information from the not-so-distant past and see our government behaving this way before? If it happened in the past, can it not happen now? And bigger and worse? Or just the same, doesn't matter, it's all the same. Power and money. Power and money. Names change, but the game pieces remain the same.
And no amount of emmigrating and expatriating can save me from my own complicity in this regime. I am guilty as anyone.
(seriously, consider yourself warned)
Just back from seeing Syriana. My body is tight as a spring. I feel my chest has been squeezed so tight, for so long, it will never return to its usual plasticity. My jaw is tight and I find my teeth grinding against each other. And my brow. My brow is so furrowed my eyes are almost buried. I realized when the movie finally ended that I'd been sitting on the edge of my seat for about two hours of the two-hour-and-fifteen minute film -- next to Dreadlock, who could barely contain her boredom. That's it. I'm done with Dreadlock. We have nothing to offer each other and I'd much prefer time alone than time wasted with her.
Syriana. Such a tricky, complicated, brilliant movie (still a movie, still Hollywood, still, don't worry, in the end it more or less works out for the insanely attractive, straight, white, heterosexual family) -- I noticed driving home that I'm angry. Deeply angry. Impotently angry. It's the source of the clenching, squeezing, constriction in my whole body. This movie is brilliant and we see our government, more than wedded to big-oil, more than nefariously orchestrating the flow and flux of power in the middle-east, we see, I am sure, a pretty fair depiction of exactly how disgusting and repulsive and deeply fucked up and machiavellian it all is. And we all sit in the fucking upscale, white, yuppie, McMennamin's theatre, and we nod and gasp at all the right moments and we see the parallel between the George Clooney character and the kid who becomes a suicide bomber, we see them as the pure-hearted martyrs that they are, we see the only three good people die and the world is left with only the most wicked and the most stupid, the drones, the lackeys, and the powerbrokers, left to the scheming and shmoozing and the picking one another off left and right, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
And we get up and walk out to our CARS which run on the OIL that's at the heart of all this CORRUPTION and MAYHEM and VIOLENCE and we drive to our comfortable, American homes. Why are we allowed to see this movie?? Because it won't make one goddamn bit of difference. If every man, woman and child in this country watches this movie, believes it to be an accurate depiction of the business of oil and power in the world, and recognizes that we all, every last one of us, has blood on our hands -- even if that happens, it won't change a thing. We are too comfortable. We are too fat on our comfort. And we've been made stupid by our comfort, too stupid to care.
Yes, yes, we live in the greatest nation, the most free nation, free enough to let us see this movie in which our own government is depicted as the most unscrupulous, greedy, oil-hungry, murderous, back-stabbing, power-monger imaginable. But the fact of this great freedom is exactly what renders the information in this movie impotent. That's what is so enraging. It is a movie. It is entertainment. We are allowed to see it, in the name of entertainment. If we stood up and accused our government of actually behaving this way, we'd be called crazy, cynical, hysterical, terrorist. Why should we think our government doesn't actually behave this way? Why is it cynical, crazy, hysterical to think the government behaves this way now, when we can look at declassified information from the not-so-distant past and see our government behaving this way before? If it happened in the past, can it not happen now? And bigger and worse? Or just the same, doesn't matter, it's all the same. Power and money. Power and money. Names change, but the game pieces remain the same.
And no amount of emmigrating and expatriating can save me from my own complicity in this regime. I am guilty as anyone.
posted by reasonably prudent poet at 10:17 PM
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