Stupor Bowl

Ah, the Superbowl, the one day of the year where Americans sit on their asses for five hours, gorging themselves and watching tv, and actually critically engage the commercials that every minute destroy consumer choice and rob Americans of their individual desires. In a society where importance and expense are synonymous, it is the ‘most important’ advertising day of the year. In short, Superbowl commercials are the most concentrated spectacular display of American fears and desires, (“fears” because what do commercials do other than replace fear with desire?) as seen by the capitalists who produce them.

This year the most controversial ad was supposed to be Focus on the Family’s anti-choice propaganda, but it played almost even-handed in comparison to the onslaught of misogyny, alienation and misanthropy on display in the other ads. Audi presented a fascistic future in which “green police” would arrest you for using the wrong light bulb. Dodge offered up a series of men staring straight into the camera, while a voiceover droned in miserable monotone about submitting all of their free will and happiness to their bosses and their wives, with the car being tagged “Man’s last stand”. Budweiser had a thousand people turn themselves into a human bridge a la Buzby Berkely, or more accurately Albert Speer, so that a Bud truck could arrive at their bar, where they could then buy the beer.

Perhaps the most symptomatic ad of the evening was one from Bridgestone tires. A car speeds across a post-apocalyptic landscape, and stops at a roadblock, where a leather-clad cyborg-ish man declares in a menacing accent “Your tires or your life.” Suddenly, the passenger door opens, and a sexy, post-apocalyptically (which is to say scantily) clad woman stands, bewildered, outside the door. The car screams away, and the man cries :“Your life, not your wife!”

On display last night in commercials by Doritos, Budweiser, FloTV, Dockers, and others was not the standard misogyny of advertising: ie, a sexy, bikini-clad girl standing next to pizza. These were narrative ads depicting men being made miserable by their wives and girlfriends, with the product being promoted as a solution to this misery. Rarely since the end of the Bush administration has such straightforward contempt been on display in every home in America.

The New York Times, in a typically weak critique, has pointed out this misogyny: “There seems to be a theme in many of the Super Bowl spots: the need to reassure men that they are as manly as they hope they are… [the Dodge ad] showed men thinking to themselves about the women in their lives. The thoughts were not of the type to win plaudits from feminists; they were grudging and stereotyped.” But the Times failed to realize why these men need to be ‘reassured’. Or rather the Times, as always, failed to ask.

Today, with unemployment, political impotence, debt and fear for the future at an all time high, Madison Avenue can no longer sell with images of affluence and happiness. The distance between the reality of working class lives and the dream image of superbourgeois luxury has become too great. Even Coke ran an ad with the Simpsons’ Mr. Burns, archetypal arch capitalist, being foreclosed out of home and possessions. Americans (men and women, because in a society in which misogyny is so deeply ingrained, women self-identify as sexy hate-objects, and like it) see themselves in the landscape of the apocalyptic Bridgestone ad, which echoes the worlds of such recent movies as The Road, Book of Eli, 2012, etc. This year advertisers could not even promise the lie of affluence and happiness being one new car away. Instead, they can only offer their products as ameliorators against the degradation of 21st century America. Desperate to increase sales, advertising must make visible and obvious its most powerful tools, hate and alienation, in order to rationalize buying new tires, or more beer, or better pants.

But if advertisers feel the need to turn up the heat, perhaps it is because they unconsciously sense that the current state of affairs will be bad enough to allow the alienation they now visibly exploit to slip away. Advertisers fear an awakening of Americans to the material reasons for their suffering and thus to a moving away from the mad, spiraling self-consumption of the last thirty years. To prevent this, advertisers must make sure that the misery of American consumers remains a spectacle, an image that can be bought and sold, so Americans keep groping for their wallets instead of their guns.

-- No Innocents

The Decade in Hate, or, Reasons Why America and Americans Deserve Everything They Have Coming To Them, pt 2

In its most anti-democratic ruling since Dred Scott v. Sanford, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled today American elected officials may now officially and openly be purchased by corporations.

The Shape of Failure

The Decade in Hate, or, Reasons Why America and Americans Deserve Everything They Have Coming To Them

A partner series consisting of empirical evidence why our decadent and cruel empire, for quite logically explainable and rationally apprehensible reasons, deserves everything it has coming to it.

NYTimes reports that 107 people have died while being detained in American immigration detention centers. Many of these centers are privately run, that is to say, run by private enterprises whose guiding and primary concerns are the making of profit rather than ensuring the course of justice accordance with due process of the law in international standards of human rights. Many of the people held in these facilities have not been convicted of any crime, and many are not even clearly illegal immigrants but are in the midst of legal procedures that would determine their immigration status. The deaths have usually as resulted from neglect and abuse, and the report shows that both government and private entities made extensive efforts to cover the circumstances of many of these deaths.

The Inarticulate Groans of the Rabble

Feedback on The Year In Hate

Hey weiner patrol, the year in h8 is gr8, however, your writing suxx and your personality though initially charming is ultimately and undeniably hollow.
- Screwge

The Year in Hate: Cinema Selection #2

A Serious Man by the Coen Brothers



Set a month before the Six Day War (a calendar reading May 1967 is visible in the scene with the First Rabbi), the Coen Brothers' very personal film about the Jewish suburbs of the Midwest America is astounding. Words fail where hate prevails.

The film is frequently hailed (or decried) as misanthropic. However, in order to make any universal statement one must make it by way of the particular, and critics have been dancing around an ugly truth about the film and the way it makes it’s case against humanity, namely, by way of a deep, profound, authentic, sincere, and—most frightening of all—justified anti-Semitism, an anti-Semitism made all the more sincere by its personal nature. This is not the vulgar, racial anti-Semitism of bygone years (embodied by the protagonist's anti-Semitic neighbor), but a vicious, rational renunciation of Judaism both as a theological-moral philosophy and as a secular culture, the latter denunciation much more significant given the secularism of the modern Jewish and specifically American Jewish Diaspora. The fact that the Coen Brothers are Jewish makes the film no less dangerous in the wrong hands, as anti-Semitism has always been accompanied by a certain intellectual pretentiousness absent in more vulgar forms of racism. But, in the right hands, this film offers a generous anti-Semitism, like that of Nietzsche's: an anti-Semitism which loses its particular character of singling out Jews because it is infact just one ray of a veritable rainbow of hatred, one aspect of a universal anti-humanism. As a friend put it, it’s a film that invites everyone to be Jewish for an hour and a half, and makes them hate being Jewish. A Serious Man does for anti-Semitism what The Girlfriend Experience does for misogyny: reclaims it as a legitimate means to allegorize the rottenness of our society.
Israel is the tornado.

The Year in Hate: A Multipart Series

Join us for The Year in Hate, a multipart series honoring the most destructive people, films, albums, and events of 2009 with homages of inconsistent length. The series will expire on Feb 14, the Chinese New Year, the only New Year that matters any more.

The Year in Hate: Cinema Selection #1

Antichrist by Lars von Trier


Philosopher Nina Power, who for my penny has written the definitive criticism on the film, calls von Trier’s much-needed polemic against touchy-feely "green" ecological sentiment

so transcendentally misogynist that it fails to be applicable to any empirical woman that could ever exist… Antichrist is disturbing because ultimately there is no separating the natural from the unnatural, right from wrong. There is trauma because there is life and then death, and none of it means anything.

We would be remiss, however, to take all this as cause for despair. Afterall, von Trier has said that he made Antichrist as something fun to do to help pull him out of a crippling bout of depression, and Antichrist is nothing if it is not, in addition to being a metaphysical horror film, a really entertaining comedy. Any one who’s ever been truly nihilisticallydepressed (that is, depressed as much as a result of intellectual reasons as hereditary/biochemical ones--alas too few!) knows that such episodes vacillate between agonizing bouts of melancholy, disgust, and inarticulate aggression on the one hand, and an even more nihilistic state of dry bemusement on the other, whereby ones own suffering begins to appear to one as a pathetic spectacle, a bad joke. It’s a question of distance, identification, and alienation. One can only take seriously such sentiments as “Life is meaningless!” or “I hate everything, most of all myself!” for so long until they become hilarious, until one has achieved the a sufficient level of self-alienation to regard such thoughts as soft-headed, self-indulgent, adolescent, and useless. This distance towards ones own suffering (“No one cares about your feelings, so why should you?”) can often functionally improve the health of a depressed person, even as drives them further down the rabbit hole in terms of their thinking, and it is just a matter of time until this alienation from one’s troubles sours into self-hatred “My suffering was only a burlesque of real suffering, a parody of life's real troubles, and yet since it afflicted me so then I must be truly, rationally, and rightly contemptible.”). The whole cycle replays itself.

This entire affective economy, which trades in blackest hate and self-mockery, plays out in a single, infamous scene in Antichrist, [[SPOILER ALERT: AND REALLY, ANTICHRIST DESERVES NOT BEING SPOILED, NOT THAT ANYTHING ISN’T ALREADY IRREDEEMABLY SPOILED TO BEGIN WITH]] in which Willem Defoe stumbles upon a talking fox in a forest. The Fox, which has just been devouring its own intestines, snaps at at Defoe and declares, in an ominous booming voice, “Chaos reigns!”. Then--and here's the punchline--the sky opens up with rain. We are not at all mistaken to laugh at this, nor is the scene ironic or meant to be enjoyed in a so-bad-it’s-good kind of way. This scene is nothing more or less than a very good joke. One can picture von Trier tossing and turning in his bed, tortured by the revelation that "chaos reigns" until he cracks up with self-mocking glee over how fatuous and vacuous this sentiment is, how adolescent he is for allowing himself to be so affected by it, and deciding to debase his own suffering by putting this thought, the maxim of a vulgar cosmology, it into the mouth of a poorly rendered talking animal. The film has been criticized for its sophomoric use of Jungian mytho-dream imagery, which has been perceived not as the result of genuine naivety but as a cynical and lazy abortion of a potentially fruitful creative impulse. In fact the self-undermining stupidity of Antichrist’s allegorical flourishes is part of what gives it its power: the film does not just represent nihilistic depression, it induces it in its audience, or at least simulates for the audience a crucial and overlooked part of its self-cannibalizing affective cycle.

Is there a fundamentally subjective dimension to the universe other than humanity, or is the universe completely indifferent and alien to us? The sorrowful music of Tuva conjures in one’s imagination the expanse of the Siberian desert, the enormity and sparseness of which seem almost designed to symbolize the indifference of Nature to human suffering, and this indifference is itself sad. Sad for whom? To us, for sure, but also necessarily for some absent third party who can witness and thus fully appreciate this tragedy of missed connections. But since as materialists we have to insist that there is no possible third party, no God in Heaven to weep for is, this sadness can only be a feeling which nobody feels, and is for that reason all the more sad. This sadness is the mediating term or messenger particle between object and subject, the crack in matter through which sprung the hell of experience, and its name is Disaster.

Looking at the film we could say either Nature is complicit with the human horror (Women really are evil, gynocide is Natural, etc), or fundamentally indifferent to it, as Defoe’s scientific-rationalist psychologist asserts. The first is mere superstition, but the latter is not quite right either, since it may be the case that the indifference of nature to the human horror is itself horrific, the index of an even more ancient, primordial horror at the base of all Being. But this cannot be. This primordial horror is only a projection onto the world of something that can only be felt by people, and therefore, since it is only a feeling, can only exist in, through, and because of humanity. Humanity gives birth to horror, though we could not have conceived it alone. This is the true original sin to which von Trier's Eden bears witness, the sin of which Nature is the cause but for which we are to blame.

And this is all only the half of it, for the metaphysical horrors of the film’s second half are nothing in comparison to all-too-familiar domestic hell of the first, the exquisite and hatefully-rendered realism of which makes Antichrist the most damning allegory of heterosexuality since Miss Julie.