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is a greed-head American weapons mogul who has an improbable crisis of conscience, transforms himself into an impregnable weapon (his avatar), and uses Yankee might, money, and ingenuity to protect cowering Afghan families from marauding warlords. It’s the boffo Marvel superhero picture Iron Man that best sums up our psyches as the nation redoubles its Afghanistan efforts. Among movies centering on the “war on terror,” only this year’s The Hurt Locker has a chance of breaking through the bubble (assuming it racks up Oscar nominations and gets a rerelease)-and only because Kathryn Bigelow celebrates (a tad ironically, but with gusto) the kind of adrenaline-fueled American machismo that on the home front finds its outlet in Avatar-like video games. Old-fashioned anti-war conscience dramas flopped so hard you still feel the vibrations. president in history-could barely rupture our pipe dreams of omnipotence. Bush in a school chair with a book about a pet goat, staring into space after he has just been informed that his country is under attack-the most emasculating footage of a U.S. Michael Moore preached to an unprecedentedly large choir in his documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, but even the sight of George W.
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They depicted innocent children (not just little dark ones, but white and affluent!) paying for our crimes. They rubbed our noses in our ignorance of other cultures.
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(The people who made Syriana had American names, but they might as well have been French.) With blinkered American protagonists and multiple multinational subplots, these movies aimed to show us that we’re not masters of the world, and that our cavalier exploitation (and consumption) will rebound on us. But we Americans don’t pay to be slapped around, at least in public, especially from directors who are Mexican ( Babel), British ( Body of Lies), or, God help us, Swedish (the recent Mammoth). The most compelling films of the last decade, bad and good, suggested that globalization and instant communication have not brought us closer but driven us deeper into our dream worlds.Ī few of those filmmakers-the more socially conscious ones, idealists and cynics both-delivered some hard “Snap out of it!” slaps. In any case, it underscores the range of ways in which filmmakers have begun to dramatize-directly, indirectly, and by accident, via osmosis-the breakdown of connections between people and one another, the planet, and even their own minds. Is this an alarming development? Is it a bourgeois-capitalist-masturbatory-decadent trend that bodes ill for our capacity to confront future economic devastation, environmental catastrophe, peak oil, and terrorism? Maybe. That’s the only way they think they can achieve true autonomy. They crave avatars, fantasy extensions of themselves in realms of their own design.
#Simulacra 2 locker picture movie#
If the movie works with audiences (I haven’t seen it yet), it might be because people seem to think differently these days about simulacra. Now, on the brink of the next decade, we await the release of perhaps the most expensive movie of all time, James Cameron’s Avatar, in which a crippled American soldier gets turned into a blue … pixel-ized … thingie, plunges into another dimension, and attains a level of vigor and moral purpose that eluded him in his own world. The last decade (and millennium) ended with the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix, the ultimate expression of our alienation from the physical world, our vague sense that we’re living in a simulacrum and desperately need to reconnect with our fellow humans and actual bodies. But psychology often follows technology, and no objective catastrophe can jar us for long out of our increasingly seductive virtual lives. You’d expect that when a decade essentially begins (towers fall) and ends (bubbles burst) with rude awakenings, with sudden bombardments of reality, that it would slow the drift of American movies into the realm of the private, the solipsistic, the computer-generated. Film of the Decade: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Photo: Focus Features/Everett Collection (poster).