5 Masterpieces of Contemporary American Cinema: Beyond The Crucible

In part one of this series, we discussed a number of films which encapsulate the depravity of an America enslaved to unbridled corporate power, and how many of our countrymen dispense with all semblance of morality in order to earn a living.

In part two we will revisit this theme, while delving into “the war on terror” and the grave dangers of biofascism.

1. Up in the Air

Directed by Jason Reitman; starring George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, and Anna Kendrick (2009)

Up in the Air unveils the macabre rotting heart of an America in the throes of late-stage unfettered capitalism. The protagonist, Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), embodies the amorality of many Americans who flourish in this ruthless and unforgiving world. Bingham’s illustrious job is firing people, which he does by flying around the country and terminating American workers whose employers are too cowardly to do this unsavory work themselves.

At one point in the film Clooney’s boss, Craig Gregory (Jason Bateman), gives a pep talk to his team excitedly explaining how housing, retail, the auto industry and other sectors of the economy are in an abysmal state. This is cause for considerable glee he informs his team of hit men, as woeful economic times offer no shortage of people to fire – and this is good for business.

Due to unchecked privatization and the lack of a social safety net, losing one’s job can quickly land an American in a precarious financial position, but as American society has likewise devolved into a Tower of Babel losing one’s job can also bring about a loss of identity, a motif that is raised repeatedly throughout the film.

Like many Americans who have managed to retain a comfortable middle class existence, our protagonist’s conception of success revolves exclusively around money and power. In conjunction with this rather dubious value system, he relishes the prestige of regularly flying for his work and clings to the childish dream of being one of the few to reach ten million frequent flyer miles. The selfishness and lack of empathy for those whose lives he helps destroy is shared by fellow corporate cannibals Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga) and Ryan’s protege, Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), who adhere to a similar, if not even more, ruthless ethos.

Initially, Ryan lives purely for his career and eschews meaningful long-lasting relationships, a philosophy on display when he grudgingly agrees to attend his sister’s wedding. His estrangement from his family (undoubtedly familiar for many American viewers) is mollified when he inadvertently commits a number of selfless acts to help the young couple.

Ryan’s hyper-individualism is upended when he unwittingly falls in love with the heartless Alex, who ends up treating him precisely how he has treated the thousands of people he has fired over the years, raising the question of whether using human beings like disposable plastic cups is such a great idea after all.

Bingham’s incessant travels hinder his ability to form long-lasting relationships but also unmoor him from belonging to any particular place, thereby mirroring the mercenary existence of corporations; while his apartment is a sterile hotel room devoid of artwork, keepsakes, and warmth.

Deceptively insightful and unerringly astute, Up in the Air casts the spotlight on an America where voracious corporations operate with complete impunity while millions of Americans lack good health insurance and education, unionization; and above all, real communities, without which we are cast into a pit of solitude, despair, and appalling dehumanization.

As the timeless Zulu proverb Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu reminds us: “A person is a person through other people;” or more simply, “I am, because you are.”

2. Equals

Directed by Drake Doremus; starring Nicholas Hoult and Kristen Stewart (2015)

Perhaps the most important movie ever made about the informed consent ethic and its inextricable connection to democracy, Equals tells the story of an Orwellian police state where a people known as The Collective have been enslaved to a psychiatric dictatorship and emotionally lobotomized.

Drake Doremus (who incidentally had a bad experience with psychotropic drugs as a child) masterfully demonstrates what can be lost when informed consent and the oath to do no harm are tossed to the wayside and physicians become the servants of a sinister political apparatus.

Shot with an elegant and ethereal cinematography, Equals is likewise a compelling dystopian futuristic film in that it succeeds in fashioning a society anchored in a value system which is very alien and yet simultaneously eerily familiar to our own; and viewers who understand the grievous crimes of the Cult of Psychiatry, the Church of Vaccinology, the Branch Covidians, the opioid epidemic, and the war on informed consent generally will be transfixed by its hallowed and undying message.

Malfunctioning humans who begin to re-experience emotions despite genetic modifications designed to eliminate them are diagnosed with SOS, or “switched-on syndrome,” which the viewer knows to be an imaginary disease but which the characters trapped in this totalitarian hell have been taught from birth to fear as an incurable condition inevitably leading to terrible suffering and death. 

Sufferers of SOS who progress from Stage 1 to Stage 4 and fail to commit suicide are committed to the dreaded DEN, or Defective Emotional Neuropathy facility – the police state’s prison and political psych ward. “Coupling” is strictly forbidden and those who fail to seek “treatment” for their illicit emotions are called “hiders.” The supremely powerful police are chillingly referred to as Health and Safety.

Amidst the horrors of this biofascist 1984, a love affair develops between Nia (Kristen Stewart) and Silas (Nicholas Hoult), who eventually realize that it is their “illness” that allows them to experience deep emotions without which they wouldn’t have been able to fall in love and share such special moments together.

Equals depicts a terrifying world where bodily autonomy has ceased to exist, emotions are a disease, and love is the greatest crime of all. A grave warning of what can unfold when health care is weaponized and dissent pathologized, the haunted poetry of Equals will stay locked in your heart long after the final credits have ebbed and melted away.

3. Camp X-Ray

Directed by Peter Sattler; starring Kristen Stewart, Payman Maadi, and Lane Garrison (2014).

Kristen Stewart is superb as Amy Cole, a young soldier assigned to Guantanamo Bay in Peter Sattler’s Camp X-Ray. From a small Southern town, poorly educated, and indoctrinated to believe that all Muslims are terrorists, she is initially a devout believer in “the mission.”

Her grim ideological ship capsizes when she begins to develop a friendship with one of the prisoners, Ali Amir. As their bond strengthens and she learns to look at Ali as a tortured and wrongfully incarcerated man, she starts to question the veracity of what she has been told about “the war on terror,” and her growing sense of unease about how they are “defending freedom” alienates her from her fellow soldiers.

In this man-made hell the detainees are prisoners of the body, and yet the guards are also prisoners; for they are imprisoned in a cage of lies, ignorance, authoritarianism and the scourge of unreason. They are prisoners of the soul.

Through her growing empathy we observe Amy journey from a callous soldier that unquestioningly follows orders to a more compassionate person who is increasingly loath to blindly believe what she is told. As she comes to look at her only friend at Guantanamo as a suffering human being her humanity is restored, and her soul is duly saved from the plains of demonic nihilism reserved for those who blindly hate another people.

A heartrending tale, Camp X-Ray is nevertheless an uplifting one, and as we gaze within its haunted waters we are reminded that even within the darkest glades of evil there can still be a ray of light.

4. Redacted

Directed by Brian De Palma; starring Patrick Carroll, Rob Devaney, and Izzy Diaz (2007)

Called “one big mess” by the Los Angeles Times and “an almost total failure” by the BBC, Redacted is one of the most devastating anti-war films made in recent decades. A fictionalized reconstruction of the events that led up to a murderous raid on an Iraqi home outside Baghdad by US Army soldiers in which a young girl was raped and murdered along with her family, Redacted is the antithesis of the nauseating American Sniper and other jingoistically depraved Hollywood war movies. 

In the sense that the film engages in a retelling of a significant historical event using a fictional documentary format, Redacted is reminiscent of Paul Greengrass’ excellent Bloody Sunday. Yet it is also a masterpiece of the found footage genre, and in this regard shares much in common with the nightmarish Apocalypse Cult (also known as Apocalyptic) and The Blair Witch Project. Merging these two styles while injecting an uncompromising anti-imperialist sentiment, Brian De Palma brings the senseless savagery of the Iraq War into our laps and living rooms. Clinging to our lapels, it doesn’t let us look away.

An unusual example of polyphonic narration in cinema, Redacted is told through a variety of narrative voices, each of which records the Iraq War from a distinct perspective.

Much of the story unfolds through the lens of the unscrupulous Private Angel Salazar, who intends to use the footage he records of his time in the military to get into film school. Additional scenes (some of which are interestingly not even recorded by human beings) are shot by rebel jihadists, a security camera from inside the wire, a camera recording the interrogation of the soldiers who participate in the brutal raid, footage from French TV and Iraqi TV, and a website for a soldier’s wife to share her thoughts. 

Many of these scenes initially appear as live footage uploaded to social media, and as the images pass from the eye to the brain a disorientation ensues which forces the viewer to repeatedly question which images are “real” and which are “an illusion.”

As the American education system is rigged to breed sheep, an effective psyop requires information saturation bombing, and this is precisely how the psyops that went hand in hand with the Branch Covidian putsch and the destruction of Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Yugoslavia, and to a somewhat lesser extent Iraq and Afghanistan were successful. Ironically, while Redacted contains a great deal of truth about Washington’s invasion of Iraq, the legacy media lemmings will invariably dismiss it as sensationalist nonsense, and “just a movie.”

Vividly resurrected are the helpless Iraqi civilians trapped in a hellscape where the rule of law has been dissolved, and the new reigning power is a band of unhinged barbarians. In this same vein, the film underscores the profound ignorance and dehumanization of many American soldiers fighting wars of which they know nothing, in countries of which they know even less, and who harbor a fathomless rage from being relentlessly humiliated all their lives by an unseen hand; a hand, which unbeknownst to these dogs of war, has duped them into fighting for the very government which has so debased them all their lives. 

As transpires in Oliver Stone’s Platoon and De Palma’s Casualties of War a rift unfolds within the platoon, with some soldiers objecting to the deliberate targeting of civilians in an attempt to exact revenge for fallen comrades; but as Yeats once bemoaned, “The best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity.” If a soldier stands by and does nothing while their fellow storm troopers commit a war crime, will they not have to live with this on their conscience until the day they die?

Repeatedly blurring the line between a dramatic film and a documentary, Redacted ponders the significance of launching an illegal war of aggression in an age where mass media and social media, which can work together and which can likewise be at odds with one another, wield enormous power. 

Redacted encourages the viewer to think about the ways in which propaganda can be used to manipulate, deceive, and dupe people into thinking that they understand a conflict of which they know nothing (Russia’s “unprovoked invasion” being a perfect example). And yet as war imagery (both still and video) can be used to foment lies, treachery, and deceit, De Palma turns the tables on the presstitutes by demonstrating how it can also be used to reveal the truth.

Shocking, violent, and relentlessly harrowing Redacted vividly portrays the Tartarean horror wrought by Washington’s sacking of Iraq, encapsulated by the diabolical destruction of one innocent and defenseless Iraqi family.

5. Blackfish

Directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite (2013)

“There is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men” wrote Herman Melville in Moby-Dick, a reality glaringly on display in Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s poignant film Blackfish.

One of the more unsettling documentaries to come out in recent years, Blackfish tells the tragic story of how whales are treated in captivity, where SeaWorld and other marine mammal theme parks treat orcas with great cruelty in order to get them to perform aquatic stunts, an extravaganza of villainy tied to a multi-billion dollar industry.

Indeed, this is yet another instance where what is profitable is simultaneously deeply unethical, and the marine parks that debase these wondrous creatures and ravage their souls also endanger their trainers who are frequently young, naive, and ignorant of the fact that orcas can be very dangerous when held in conditions tantamount to torture and forced to become circus animals.

(Starting about five years ago orcas started ramming small boats and attacking their rudders in the Iberian Peninsula, the Strait of Gibraltar; and to a somewhat lesser extent, off the Shetland Islands. Marine biologists have proposed a number of theories to try and explain this phenomenon. Perhaps these ornery blackfish have seen the same movie, albeit without the screen?)

At the heart of this seminal cinematic work is the excruciating and seemingly never-ending destruction of the orca Tilikum, who is kidnapped from Icelandic waters at the age of two, and is henceforth condemned to a life of wretchedness away from his pod. (Orcas typically stay with their mothers their entire lives). Transferred from one marine park to another, his fate is not unlike that of a slave in the antebellum South. Suffering repeated humiliations and brutalized into becoming a plaything for the amusement of the pseudo sentient, Tilikum becomes increasingly aggressive and ends up killing three people. Are humans fundamentally any different? Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas comes to mind, along with certain demonic practices all too common in American prisons, such as sensory deprivation and pitting prisoners against one another. 

(Other imprisoned cetaceans have rebelled against their captors, such as a well publicized dolphin attack of a trainer at the Miami Seaquarium three years ago).

Unlike with violent dogs that are put down, Tilikum’s sperm was used for breeding purposes (a practice also reminiscent of the antebellum South) and his descendants have likewise shown a proclivity towards violence, such as one of his sons, Kyuquot, who nearly drowned his trainer.

Commenting on the dastardly practice of kidnapping orcas, The Whale Sanctuary Project states:

“By any definition and by any standard, keeping these apex predators of the ocean in small tanks for the amusement of tourists is more than just wrong; it is a crime against each of them individually and a sin against nature….”

Cowperthwaite forces us to examine the ways in which we treat animals, especially highly intelligent and evolved animals such as orcas. For the iniquitous manner in which these magnificent creatures are treated will ultimately mirror how we treat each other, and is yet another example of rapacious oligarchic power fomenting moral degradation, wickedness, and death.

Conclusion

These penetrating films remove the veil of obfuscation ceaselessly fomented by academia and the mass media, revealing a system of exploitation and oppression that is devouring millions of lives. 

Due to the increasingly deplorable state of American education, the ruling establishment faces fewer and fewer obstacles in enslaving the population to delusive fears of oligarchically constructed bogeymen, and Redacted and Camp X-Ray underscore the dangers of a government deflecting anger away from itself and onto an imaginary enemy through the ancient, yet all too pervasive tactic of scapegoating.

Many of the characters discussed in this series that have been enveloped by a pall of amorality have been raised in a dog-eat-dog world where one either prevails or is reduced to a state of destitution, and they would rationalize their actions by saying that they are simply doing everything in their power to survive. However, as the characters of Jane in The East, Arthur in Michael Clayton, and Amy in Camp X-Ray remind us, while people can lose their moral bearings this doesn’t necessarily mean that they will never find them again. Amidst this maelstrom of inhumanity, the body yearns for the soul, and the soul for the body.

These bold works of cinema open a window into a reeling society that is being ravaged by the wolves of unchained capital, wolves which relentlessly cultivate ignorance, economic inequality, autocratization and atomization, revealing all too vividly what we have become – but not, as Langston Hughes once eloquently cautioned – what must be.

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