Sponsored

Rating: Null/10 (18 August 2012)

I am using a somewhat popular blogging platform (not google's) for workspace on a project I'm running on cinematic abstraction. I am not into the social aspect of it, though I have developed contacts. It just offers appealing options in the code. Now and then, as a kind of smoke break, I switch from personal work on my dashboard to the general stream of published content. I mostly filter for cinema, so suppose I am blocking out a lot of junk, but still, being able to tune in that channel of youthful stream-of-consciousness allows for some pretty cool observations.
The age of average user in that place seems to be below twenty. They blog and reblog like crazy, with new posts arriving every minute. The level is several notches above Twitter, and predominantly visual. It goes beyond 'liking' something, to putting together some attractive personality. Items that get a lot of traction, within what is filtered by me, include fashion, urban nightscape photography, Sofia Coppola, everything tagged Dali and surrealism. There is the occasional Walt Whitman quote followed by pictures of waffles or movie stars.
So, spending quite a bit of time with (partially) the target-group for this film, I have to report: a sizable portion of our youth is not dumb and desensitized, it seems to me, they may be melodramatic (youth seldom isn't), but they are curious, alert, visual creatures. They are looking for art that teases the imagination. In ten years time, some of them are going to be commendable artists.
So, if I'm being honest, I would be much, much more accepting of something like this, if it was a spontaneous, say collaborative project generated by teenagers from that community. The focus would have been largely the same, I'm sure: stifled passions, cruel , dystopic adult world. But the personality?
What we have here is that adults in the high corporate levels have made many of the same remarks, and here is the shrewd business plan: nicely package teenage dynamics inside the visual culture that consumes and defines them. It's a smart move, and this is the most acutely aware of the recent crop, so much so it makes (the first) Twilight seem naive and old Hollywood.
What does this mean? The film is made from a lot of spare parts, as though reblogged (Battle Royale is only the most recent and obvious). It is shot as a fast-moving stream of visual snippets that is not at all the Bourne effect: the idea here is less the first-person character experience, and more of a comfortable cognitive map for a young audience growing up on internet and instant interconnectivity. It takes place in a world that venerates spectacle and celebrity, with the Gamers paraded around 'tinseltown' like the hottest new MTV stars. The battleground arena is filmed by hundreds of cameras that instantly connect everywhere, including the skies.
So far so good, an effectively aligned version of contemporary pop culture. The action once it kicks in is formulaic, but that is because the guys running this have no imagination: you can observe the director of the Games and his team of assistants, every decision they make to affect the gameflow, instead of perhaps intelligently structuring the situation is absolutely contrived and geared for special-effects: most of all, nondescript monsters to speed-up the finale. The artistic personality, since every decision is of an artistic nature, is simply unappealing.
But, here's the catch that entirely sinks this: like a bunch of smarmy, Victorian-era schoolteachers, adults responsible for this - the 'sponsors' for the event - couldn't resist imposing on the teenage playground fun with a combination of finger-wagging, 1984-style fearmongering about the future, and sensationalized movie-treatment of suffering.
The film was designed in the vein of, hinges its entire appeal, and probably used every channel of that visual culture to access an audience, then turns around and claims that culture is decadent, exploits and degrades.
Moreover, it attempts, this multimillion dollar product, to remind us that outside of the comfortably-numb limits of reality TV and the internet, in the real world out there persists hunger, inequality, and poverty. The lead is played by a girl who two years ago in Winter's Bone had to eke out a miserable existence in southern Missouri, another clue of short-sighted imagination, casting her because she was good there. The downbeat scenario is replicated whole here, including the killing of squirrels for food.
In other words: "sit down in the multiplex to have fun with this thing you have seen advertised on TV and across the internet, while we lecture with important statements on the state of the world."
If I was sixteen now, maybe I wouldn't know it, but I believe that younger self would deserve much better. So if you are that age and looking for something that nourishes with rejection, I would turn you over to something like Godard's Breathless or Harmony Korine's Gummo: rebellious films made by young filmmakers in the effort to capture a little something of what it means to live in the world. Breathless (conventionally) popularized the jump-cut that is the main device here, but was using it as a breach with established ways of seeing. It was radical in its time, and you deserve something radical in yours.
This is the 'sponsored' version, where adults take your money while pretending to educate.