Films For Action In a May 3, 2010 review of the film, Overlooked Movie Monday: Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Politics, Phil Fava writes – Noam Chomsky’s statement that “propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state” (apart from being the crux of Manufacturing Consent) has never been more lucidly conveyed for me than in this film when we see an excerpt of an old Looney Toons short with an ugly, overt anti-labor sentiment. There’s nothing quite as scary as channeling mild-mannered fascism through children’s entertainment, and what it speaks to, ultimately, is the degree to which we’re indoctrinated by these self-defeating sociopolitical principles. Whether we know it or not, we’re bred to weed out dissenters and vest all of our political power in elites who can’t possibly have shared interests with us. And that’s the clincher, I think. These grotesque corruptions of our core values and noblest democratic aspirations occur frequently and openly, and our expressions of adversarial rage in their midst are few and far between. While individual answers to these systemic problems may vary, democracy in its most poetic rendering is universal. The film concludes with some frightening images underscored by clips of Noam Chomsky discussing the desirability, functionality, and necessity of democracy for human survival, accompanied by the sullen murmurings of a faint piano. The final shot of the sun rising above amorphous clouds takes what is potentially pedantic and abstruse material and places its origins in the essence of the human spirit.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Aug 2013 08:24:25 +0000
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