By Fernando Buen Abad Domínguez on August 10, 2020
A cinematic critique of a film not yet shot or produced.
Everything is predictable. Soon (sooner than one might think) the pandemic show in the hands of the dominant ideology will appear on the screens of movie theatres (increasingly converted into home-made TV rooms) or “on demand”. It is not difficult to get ahead of the film production companies.
Starring some of the biggest box office stars and some of the most objectionable people in the audiovisual image market, (in that order) we will see the heartbreaking drama of a “love story” crisscrossed by fashionable scientific notions and the “fatality” of an inter-imperial war between Chinese, Russians and Yankees, for the control of a miraculous and planetary vaccine, where “good and evil” dispute the transnational pharmaceutical market. It will have strong condiments of horror.
There will be bedroom scenes and nudity on the edge, dramatic tension, violence with blood and insults, perverse dialogues, candid looks, fancy dresses and class contrasts. There will be car chases on the most impossible avenues of the most saturated world capitals. Special effects in bulk, sound impacts, music planned to manipulate emotions and great wastes of resources of unknown origins: limousines, airplanes, yachts, motorcycles and mansions infested with bourgeois lust. It could be a triple co-production.
It is to be expected that the pandemic will be used, like everything capitalism is capable of handling, at its unholy and unpunished whim while making gobs of money. It is to be expected that the COVID-19 will end up being ideologically inoculated and that to blame and exculpate aberrations of all kinds, it will appear on the screens as a new genre of evil that threatens “the happy bourgeois life” already crouched in some projects of “new normality”.
And, of course, the hucksters of the film industry must already be advancing proposals to trade in the number of infections, deaths and devastations suffered from the virus and from the economic system that made it lethal. Some will be thinking about action films and others will already be designing series of 5, or more, seasons. Maybe some reality shows, plays, novels, short stories and stand up. No one will want to be left out of a business that helps to sublimate, with corny plots, the raw drama of a rotten economic system that has exposed its inhuman guts.
They have had no shame in using the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Nazi-financed death camps, the coups d’état and the assassination of leaders and social movements… there is no limit to the voracity of the spectacle’s hucksters and their sponsors. And there is no conceivable sanction against the unbridled abuse and profiteering that subjects human misfortunes to the business of a few show business people.
Obscenity is squandering money to manufacture stories whose market “glamour” is intended to annihilate criticism and supplant it with class solidarity. You tie with the executioner to improve his profits. Very badly. But with everything obscene, it’s not just a moral problem. It is a symbiotic war, it is about the plundering and symbolic usurpation orchestrated by the “mass media” landowners against a world population engrossed in its fears and fragilities that have multiplied as a result of the pandemic that was declared without consultation.
All this media paraphernalia, amassed by the information monopolies and the pharmaceutical, military and banking mafias… will have, sooner or later, an expression in one or several films or “series” loaded with the nauseating recipe of bourgeois media success. They will repeat their honeyed sloppiness, their remnant gestures of pain, joy and ecstasy; their trick phrases, psychotic and supremacist, with “slogan” ambition. They will do the impossible to compress a pandemic of immense magnitude into an ideological “pay per view” capsule.
We already know all that. All that is predictable and guessable. Maybe they’ll surprise us with some technological discovery or some new “3D” effect. Otherwise it will be more of the same. We already know that before they film it. The big challenge is for us to be ready to battle their whole notion of present and past. To be alert and on intellectual and creative guard, with sharp critical thinking and the indispensable precautions so as not to be contaminated by a toxic, dazzling and paralyzing ideology, as is always the ideology of the ruling class. Another pandemic for which we do not yet have sufficient vaccines and within reach of social struggles. Let us prepare ourselves.