Can there be development and survival without vampires?

Rating: 10/10 (24 May 2008)

The film has well earned its prizes, awards and other distinctions. But beyond these labels on the sleeve of the DVD or the poster of the film, the film will remain a milestone in the cinema that tries to show the real world and the ruthlessness of its survival instinct.
The first element I will point out is that it gives the lie to Hubbard and his survival in scientology. In the real world there is no survival without development and development is first: no development then extinction. Ask Neanderthals when he was to share Europe with Cro-Magnon. The poor Neanderthals could not even fish and ran like mammoths. The real survival is in the power of man, as a species and as an individual, to develop. Survival that does not bring and presuppose development is just a fake, a false prophecy. I say that for two reasons.
The first reason is that without the oil industry, there would have been no car industry (and other inner combustion engine industry), no gas station networks, no highway networks, no suburban development. That's the most clear and brutal side of the film. The oil industry brings a new phase in the industrial revolution of its own on which we are still living and polluting. Millions of people got jobs, millions of people got income, millions of people got a present and a future. Survival in development. But this development is also violent and it is the fitter who can develop most and fastest. So on the starting line there might be many people but on the arrival line there will only be a few if not only one. It is easier to make a camel get through the eye of a needle than to bring many winners on the winning line of industrial competition.
The film is absolutely ugly and gruesome about it and it makes so many people, in the film, completely sick and disturbed. A man is ready to assume the identity of another provided this new identity is that of the main character's brother for an obvious profit. Don't forget that prophet and profit are homonyms. A child is ready to set the hut in which he is sleeping with his father and fake uncle ablaze just to mark his territory and his resistance and his dissatisfaction. And there are so many other cases.
Then, my second reason, in any fast developing situation like this one there are some people who will take advantage of it to mentally control the change, that is to say to gather people behind them and then pressurize the industrialists so that the gurus can get what they want, which is worldly power and money. These are the second type of false prophets of the industrial age. They can be religious and affiliated to any church, most of them being purely opportunistic about the rich provided they give money to the various churches, temples, synagogues or mosques, and of course other good benefacting (I mean bringing a profit to the prophet) organizations. The religious organizations and their prophets, false most of them, are the typical form of that vampiristic money sucking leeches in the USA who can only survive if God blesses the child and America.
But there are other forms that are just as deadly and life-sucking. You can see Hitler and the Nazi party, and all other fascistic movements, as exactly the same ambition: take advantage of the developing industrial revolution to line your pockets with power and money. But on the other side you can have all the socialistic and communistic preaching that is exactly the same thing. And the military forces can decide to use their weapons to become the false prophets of this industrial development. The worst concoction is when one of these political movements takes the control of the armed forces, or vice versa, and then they establish a totally irreversible dictatorship.
Irreversible, well, maybe not.
The film suggests that you can always become deaf to these and run away and start your own development in some other country or state. It also suggests that the industrialists and the prophesizing profiteers may get into a fight to the death and then some others will come and pick up the pieces and recuperate the whole treasure chest. The film does not allude to the political mode of democratic management of this development. Just be the prophet that will win an election till a new prophet comes and wins it against you and gets you out. But be sure this intruder will not last long and will be out of the job when another one comes and claim victory. Democracy is a permanent rotation of false prophets.
Alleluia
Jacques COULARDEAU