award-winning creator of Enter The House Between and author of 32 books including Horror Films FAQ (2013), Horror Films of the 1990s (2011), Horror Films of the 1980s (2007), TV Year (2007), The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia (2007), Mercy in Her Eyes: The Films of Mira Nair (2006),, Best in Show: The Films of Christopher Guest and Company (2004), The Unseen Force: The Films of Sam Raimi (2004), An Askew View: The Films of Kevin Smith (2002), The Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film & Television (2004), Exploring Space:1999 (1997), An Analytical Guide to TV's Battlestar Galactica (1998), Terror Television (2001), Space:1999 - The Forsaken (2003) and Horror Films of the 1970s (2002).
Based on the 1955 short story by Bud Schulberg, “Your Arkansas Traveler,” Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (1957) is the cautionary tale o...
I've been looking forward to this.
ReplyDeleteHey John,
ReplyDeleteAs you know I have been using this film in my classes for about 10 years now to demonstrate concepts like alienation, ideology, hegemony, false consciousness, and the use of critical theory in general. If interested, I can send you a copy of a paper I wrote in my doctoral program entitled: Escaping the Matrix: Making room for critical theory in a commodified culture. It suggests the use of critical theory in higher education as a way to rethink the system.
On a more surreal note, I notice that you did not mention Jean Baudrillard in the post. His book Simulacra and Simulation is used in the film by Neo to hide his software stash. He retrieves it when the group, including the woman with the white rabbit on her arm, shows up at his door. The software is hidden in the last chapter: On Nihilism.
Here is an excerpt:
“Melancholia is the brutal disaffection that characterizes our saturated systems. Once the hope of balancing good and evil, true and false, indeed of confronting some values of the same order, once the more general hope of a relation of forces and a stake has vanished. Everywhere, always, the system is too strong: hegemonic. Against this hegemony of the system, one can exalt the ruses of desire, practice revolutionary micrology of the quotidian, exalt the molecular drift or even defend cooking. This does not resolve the imperious necessity of checking the system in broad daylight. This, only terrorism can do.” (163)
Go back and freeze frame the scene when the agents are interrogating Neo and asking for his passport. If you have a large enough TV set take a look at the expiration date -Month, day, and year.
Baudrillard continues: “ If being a nihilist is carrying, to the unbearable limit of hegemonic systems, this radical trait of derision and of violence, this challenge that the system is summoned to answer through its own death, then I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us.” (163)
Interesting huh?
-r