The underclass is always more vital than the higher strata, unburdend by the baggage of bourgeois liberal morality, preachings of violence which justifies borrowing, exploiting, and finally cannibalizing all transgressive life into commodity kitsch and diluted into pablum. The American dream has always been about rising tides lifting all boats, from the bathtub race to America’s cup, distinction and status is to prevail. For the structure to maintain and reinforce itself, mainly through critiques of mass society – and not the consumerism which drives it- art itself must be obscured and transformed into a bullshitizing by Hollywood,a dumbing down into entertainment; for example films like Cabaret, neutralized critical content by assimilation into the society of the spectacle, a cultural habitat that serves as a prison and boundary most are unwilling to escape from.
Unfortunately,it is a trivializing destiny and role that Hollywood reserves particularly for artists opposed, and critical of all it really represents: the military-industrial- financial complex it serves so willingly and with such seductive ingenuity. This entertainment complex, propaganda and public relations, controls and shapes our consciousness,and sandbox of pop culture that encourages grown-up infantilism, and is heck-bent on controlling by treating as comic fare,ridicule, denigration as absurd, irrational delinquency, any consciousness, and attitude that threatens it by shinig the light on its tragic flaws and its own corrupted and dead corpse.What Hollywood accomplishes with brilliant dialectical feats of appropriating figures of rebellion, is to banalize them into individualized, polished, slick, impersonal, marketing archetypes, caricatures, and turning them into the symbols of the entertainment paradise, as Bell Hooks reminded us of rap music in outlaw culture where rappers are stereotyped and used by whites to work out identity issues while reinforcing racism and patriarchy- It a perverse paradise we are fed, “free”, but emotionally costly, and completely absent of critical edge and bite: pop culturized figures nothing more than fashionable mannequins on a marketing stage, ostensibly free spirits,think Henry Rollins, as all figures that seem out of the bounds of social respectability, charged with phony raw animal instinct: “transgressive” figures that seem to evade the repression barrier. Its only an illusion of the rebel sell.
Read More: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/movies/liam-lacey/hollywood-occupies-wall-street-a-love-story/article2208343/Roseanne Barr.---If Wall Street tried to put Hollywood movie-making on a scientific diet, how has Hollywood influenced Wall Street? Mostly by providing a bad role model – and not just the movie Wall Street’s sexy villain Gordon Gekko. A few months after the 2008 crisis, Neal Gabler (author of the superb history Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies and the American Dream) wrote a provocative piece for The Boston Globe about how Hollywood led Wall Street astray. Financial soundness used to be associated with Brooks Brothers suits and prudent behaviour, not Armani and gold faucets, Gabler argued. But since the eighties, Hollywood gave the United States a deregulation-loving president, Ronald Reagan, and a celebrity-obsessed culture where success was not about substance but presenting the right illusion. Wall Street culture fell in line, giving us showman-hustlers like Donald Trump, or worse, Bernie Madoff. When money men start behaving like spoiled stars, it makes sense that celebrities would prefer aligning with common folk. “In short,” concluded Gabler, “you can blame the Hollywoodization of Wall Street for our economic woes.”
The Occupy Wall Street movement has now passed its one-month birthday, and the presence of such celebrity supporters as Susan Sarandon, Rosanne Barr and Alec Baldwin has added some stars to this still-in-development living movie. But as the website Celebrity NetWorth points out, these supporters don’t fit their roles: Roseanne Barr ($80-million U.S.), Susan Sarandon ($50-million) and Alec Baldwin ($65-million) are all too rich to be part of the 99 per cent that the occupation claims to represent. “Heroes or hypocrites?” asked Fox News on its website, and soon found an “expert” (The Cult of Celebrity author Cooper Lawrence) who pronounced “they are indeed hypocrites” because “celebrities are nothing like us.Read More:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/movies/liam-lacey/hollywood-occupies-wall-street-a-love-story/article2208343/ a
---“Why did the T-shirt maker have to whisper when he made his offer of a legitimate exchange? And who did he think was going to pay the increased taxes he voted for? Certainly not himself, as he (like everyone else) was going to dodge as many as he could. Who but ‘the Rich,’ that magical invocation of a group in opposition to which we citizens have time and again impoverished ourselves?” Mamet writes. Mamet contrasts the case of the store owner with that of a father eating sushi with his young daughter, just home from college. “The father was deconstructing his California roll to eat it, retail, and the newly enlightened freshman explained to him that to do so was to disrespect the sushi chef who had labored to make the roll just so, and was his work worth nothing?” Mamet writes. Mamet continues to say that the “young Stalinist” is wrong to factor “respect” into the equation at all. The father earned the money - the fruit of his labors - and should be able to do whatever he pleases with it. Mamet, known in his early career for anti-capitalistic views, has turned rather more conservative in recent years. In his editorial, he argues that cutting taxes - and the size of government - will force those dependent on the state to find jobs that address social needs, and also marginalize the influence of lobbying. Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1011/65738.html#ixzz1bWuXNuVL
Any artistic representation, that contradicts it by exposing its inherent contradictions, those unresolvable tensions which make it alive but be stamped out: contradicted, dismissed as a distortion,a fluke, erratic, immoral, incurable. More particularly, any art or development that shows the market economy’s filthy underside of the shiny surface rock, the continuous armed conflicts, instrumentalized violence, emotional terror and fear, and traumatic anxiety, and the hysterical and perverted chase of pleasure that seeks relief, sham redemption, from them, that dares invoke an articulation as authentic social conscience, that points fingers where fault must be placed, that speaks the proverbial truth to power, must be prettified into meaningless, and regarded as a kind of misplaced glamorization of society. Any movement that courageously exposes society’s inherent barbarism, must be defeated by being re-fashioned as a silly joke, an artifact of pop culture, like cheap hippie beads, an overdone burlesque, a media caricature , an a folly instead of its own folly. The worst hypocrisy of bourgeois pacifism.
Read More:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/movies/liam-lacey/hollywood-occupies-wall-street-a-love-story/article2208343/ ---More pertinently, what do those symbolic realms of Hollywood (the film industry) and Wall Street (the financial sector) have to do with each other? There’s a kind of love story here. Wall Street used to treat Hollywood as a risky playmate, until the economic boom of the mid-2000s, when studios came up with a new deal: a chance for investors in film slates, and a share in their revenues over the film’s entire lifetime. Starting with Paramount in 2003, all the studios began collaborating in investment and revenue-sharing plans with the major Wall Street investment banks and affiliated hedge funds. According to The Hollywood Reporter, between 2005 and the 2008 meltdown, Wall Street put $15-billion into Hollywood.---
By turning Occupy Wall Street into facile, cheap entertainment, society will try to take revenge. Just wait for the movie and t.v. series. There will be no emotional truth about bourgeois society, with stark, unsparing accuracy. No holding of revengeful mirrors; distorting mirrors that discredit it by telling it is not the fair and just society it thinks it is. Yes, it is more freakish and inhumane than any human circus side-show is capable of representing. It is really Adorno’s cultural industry: products with distorting effect on individual’s because it is distorted in itself. Reality is stranger, even when viewed with innocent grotesqueness, than any artistic fiction that Hollywood can concoct.
---"Popular culture has become our common language, and to become fluent in it is, like it or not, a key part of making sense of the larger world” --Andi Zeisler
ADDENDUM:
Liam Lacey:After three years of keeping its distance during the recession, Wall Street is coming around again. Money has started to become available through multiyear, multimillion-dollar loans, against the values of studio libraries and future earnings, though the approach is more cautious. One of the most talked-about contemporary investors is Relativity Media, run by thirtysomething super bean-counter Ryan Kavanaugh. Working with a $2-billion hedge fund, Relativity has made many films with Sony, Universal and Warner Bros. A 2009 profile in Esquire (Ryan Kavanaugh Uses Math To Make Movies) explains an approach whereby, before a movie is approved for financing, “Thousands of factors are fed into
onte Carlo simulation risk assessment algorithm normally used to evaluate financial instruments.” Read More:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/movies/liam-lacey/hollywood-occupies-wall-street-a-love-story/article2208343/
Read More:http://dismalpoliticaleconomist.blogspot.com/2011/10/playwright-and-director-david-mamet.html
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David Shankbone:New York Times op-ed columnist/professional scold Paul Krugman is a like a kid on spring break right now, deliriously giddy that the growing “Occupy Wall Street” protests are, at least in his paranoid mind, validating his years of railing against politicians—mostly Republicans—who are in favor of tax cuts and reducing the unsustainable entitlement programs that will go belly up before he mercifully retires. It’s annoying enough that Krugman begins his Oct. 7 column “Confronting the Malefactors” with an unattributed rip of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” a song Stephen Stills wrote in December of 1966 after the club Pandora’s Box was closed down on Sunset Blvd. in West Hollywood. (Krugman’s a Boomer, 58, although I’d bet $100 he didn’t listen to the song when it became a minor hit in the first months of 1967.)
He begins: “There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear, but we may, at long last, be seeing the rise of a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people.” First, strip away the median age of the OWS contingent and the Tea Partiers, allow for personal cultural differences, and you’d know—but Krugman won’t acknowledge—that many of their goals are the same.
Both groups, however they express it, are angry about the prolonged recession, angry about high unemployment, angry that economically, America’s in a pickle. Who are “right people” to be angry at? Krugman says it’s the “bankers,” specifically the legal con men who gamed the markets to enrich themselves. I think both the current protesters and Tea Party adherents are angry at the same people, not only “bankers,” but politicians of both parties who don’t have the guts to buck their financial sugar daddies. And that includes the Billion Dollar Campaign Man, President Obama, as well as the sorry hack known as John Boehner, House Majority Leader. Read More:http://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/paul-krugman-s-cynical-embrace-of-occupy-wall-street
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