The Titanic Syndrome, the film by Nicolas
Hulot and Jean-Albert Lièvre, which will be out
on [French] screens October 7, will upset people.
This environmental documentary shows almost no
nature: Breaking with the postcard aesthetic
customary in the genre, the film confronts the
hard reality of poverty and injustice. It
attempts, uneasily, to say that the vertiginous
deterioration of the biosphere is the result of a
social order become insane, one which makes the
weak, the poor and the exploited bear its consequences.
The film repeats that the key to escaping
this sort of destructive logic is in the
reduction of rich countries' material
consumption. Let us bet that this discourse,
harsher than that of "little gestures for the
planet," will garner a mixed reception. And
should Nicolas Hulot begin to upset people?
The strength of his persona is to remain
popular by going right to the tip of what French
society - or more precisely, the media system
that provides access to French society - agrees to hear at any given moment.
Thus, for a decade, he has little by little
hardened his speech: At first, sounding the alarm
over the scope of the environmental disaster, he
then sought to involve citizens, then brought the
question into political terrain. He now succeeds
in demonstrating that ecology is first of all a
social issue, and criticizes - but in terms that
remain very general - "capitalism."
In the commentary that clothes the images,
he says: "I am lost." Lost? I telephone him to
understand. He answers: "I'm lost because I don't
understand that so much energy should be
necessary to put what is obvious before our
elites. People who have a sometimes dazzling
intelligence have blind spots, that is, they
don't manage to understand that their economic model will not succeed."
That's Nicolas Hulot's problem, and,
consequently, our problem: He believes that
political action today is inspired by the pursuit
of the common good. But he forgets the strength
of interests: individual and class interests.
What Hulot calls the elites are today an
oligarchy. The oligarchy does not want to hear
about the obvious facts of environmental crisis
and social disintegration because the principle
objective of the oligarchy is to maintain its own
interests and privileges. It does not concern
itself with the common good insofar as it does
not challenge the oligarchy's own position.
When one is a nice person, it's difficult to
absorb the fact that others are not all so nice.
Nicolas Hulot is about to do that, and,
especially, about to draw the appropriate
conclusions. That is: to speak in vague terms
about "capitalism" no longer, but to plunge a
knife into the flesh of class selfishness. He can
do it. But he knows that then, all of a sudden, a
number of media and of more low profile powers
will suddenly find that he has many flaws.
http://www.truthout.org/1006099
Films are for a mass market. And it's amazing how sometimes people grab a subtext and take it much farther than the surface action and message would appear to warrant. In this sense it's often better to see films as pointers, as signposts to an alternative direction than to take them literally. It's events and solutions outside the cinema that make a real difference, and just making a small hole in the media armour protecting the rotten core of the current system can show people that it's possible, and that it's also possible to make similar holes in the real-life armour protecting the rich and powerful. Not only small holes either but much bigger ones.
So the more the merrier. Michael Moore's documentaries, satirical films like Wag the Dog or even Mars Attacks, Ken Loach's work, and now The Titanic Syndrome, they all add up to more than the sum of each individual stabbing.
The death of a thousand cuts for the lying presentation of *our* world by *their* media. The lies have been exposed for decades in well-researched and cogently argued books by writers and analysts like Chomsky (eg "9-11" "Manufacturing Consent", "Profit Over People") and Pilger (eg Freedom Next Time), and eye-witness accounts like Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins. But these are not mass market works, and make an impact on an avant garde of independent and critical readers. Films can make a mass impact.
C
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