Here's another 1000 + word essay I wrote for no particular reason...
Do you enjoy the thrill of going to the movie theatre? Do you like the anything is possible atmosphere, the multicolored carpeting donning the movie reels of the past, the scent of high calorie imitation butter and popcorn, the potentially bed bug laden seats? If you’re like me, you love going to the movies. I like the adventure of going to the movies. That’s what film is all about isn’t it – taking the audience somewhere new, like Hogwarts in the Harry Potter series or Middle Earth in The Lord of The Rings Trilogy. But movies aren’t just made to purely entertain an audience. Recently, it seems that more and more Hollywood celebrities are becoming the faces of causes and issues. Remember when Will Ferrell created that ludicrous, yet comical, YouTube video of himself in a robe, sitting in front of that fireplace, begging for us eighteen or older to vote to re-elect Obama, and even jokingly offering to buy Obama voters pizza? Wherever I look, I seem to find a celebrity endorsing a product, a person or a cause. Take a look at all the weight loss commercials for Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, Nutrisystem – all of them are using celebrity endorsements.
We know what these political puppets are doing. They are trying to entice the viewer to partake in whatever they are selling. You may recall a negative campaign video (negative campaign videos are in fact more effective than positive campaign videos, both parties just don’t want to admit to it) that President George W. Bush used against Al Gore during the election. A screen shot of the word “rats” was inserted into the sequence of images the audience viewed. This is what you might call subliminal imagery. Subliminal imagery leaves a lasting impression with viewers, without them knowing it, hence subliminal, and it’s completely legal. In fact, when you are sitting in the movie theatre watching the trailers of upcoming films, an image so quick that we don’t really see it, say an image of a large soda, may flash on the screen for mere fractions of a second, and in turn, causes you to experience thirst. And inevitably you’ll end up running to the concession stand for a twenty-dollar soda (price gouging at the theatre is another story and I won’t go off on that tangent now) before the film begins.
This ‘brain washing’ technique got me thinking just a tad bit more than I usually do about film. A new film, Promised Land, is out. Promised Land stars Matt Damon, Francis McDormand and John Krasinski. The film is about a salesman working for a natural gas company. Apparently, the company Damon’s character works for wants to frack for natural gas and there ends up being a bunch of hoopla about it. According to IMDB, Matt Damon, as Steve Butler, “experiences life-changing events”. First of all, lets analyze this - take Damon’s character name. Steve Butler. It’s a nice, simple, average-joe kind of name. But, let’s look at his last name. Butler. That’s right - it’s a not-so-secret secret message. I guess the character is like a butler, a man that is about to do some sort of dirty work for another person, and this person just happens to be a corporation (and remember a corporation is a symbol for capitalism, the free market, an entity which some people despise). Take a look at the title of the film. Promised Land. If you don’t see the overt covert message in that, well then, I don’t know what to tell you.
So you thought you were just going to see a movie for entertainment, for enjoyment, from a break from reality, right? Wrong. Like anything, those commercials about losing twenty pounds for twenty dollars, Damon and his crew are trying to sell you something. This film is political statement. And the message that they want to instill is that fracking is bad and so is capitalism. Fracking is a method for extracting natural gas and oil. Fracking is something that we could do, on American soil, to produce useable energy. Fracking, along with wind, solar and nuclear power, would help us become energy independent, meaning we wouldn’t have to purchase oil from people who completely loathe and despise us and what we stand for. Energy independence is a good thing, but some politicians, what Bill O’Reilly calls leftist loonies, and oddly enough, actors, who know next to nothing about producing energy, engineering energy, or really politics, don’t like fracking. So the people that fight for energy independence really don’t want energy independence.
Think of all the films you can, and analyze them for yourself. For laughs, take a look at An Inconvenient Truth, which is a complete and utter fantastical lie. The center of Earth is most certainly not millions of degrees hot. And that graphical representation that Gore needs a ladder for (who made that for him in the first place??), is also a complete farce. Talk about a political puppet, it’s no wonder why his wife left him.
Another recent, yet well-crafted piece of cinematic art is the film Lincoln, with Daniel Day-Lewis, directed by Steven Spielberg. It is a prodigious film, I must admit, and it is a wonderful representation of politics at it’s worst, or best, depending on how you look at how the practice of politics interferes with policymaking. Truthfully, it looks to me like nothing in Washington D.C. has really changed in the last hundred and forty plus years. Today we still have policies being pushed through, to which “we have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it” as Nancy Pelosi says regarding the then 2010 bill deemed Obamacare, votes being bought and politicians flip-flopping from one side to the other.
Would you define yourself as a critical thinker? Do you see yourself as an independent thinker? Are you aware of the messages sent from Capital Hill, from celebrities, from television, publications and other sources of entertainment and media? Have you even thought about this very subject? What do you think about what I have presented here before you?
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