There seems to be a trend in film today whereby the illusion of power is being brought to the screen with Vampires and Witches, mythical/imaginary role models empowered with more than the tools and abilities with which we are innately endowed.
Witches against the police or on their side, witches being the good and the bad women in our midst, seem to have taken over where the super human like man once reigned.
Sci-fi presides, gives bizarre dimension to reality because ordinary emotional experience is suspended. Or is it? Action, high tech production is what our youth spend money to see, to enjoy.
This trend is happening in the context of the American people gone awry due to the Bush administration's deliberate policy to ignore public protest against the Iraqi War from its inception, before the bombs fell and the Iraqi people were murdered by the millions, the Americans by the thousands.
This perceived and real powerlessness to effect the U.S. and world ruling elite is countered not with real assessment, but with the soothing hand of film that provides an illusion of power to millions who know power is not within their grasp; not under the Bush administration and not with Obama in power. These men just steer the course of a destiny that leads directly into a downward trend with periodic eruptions of doom and destruction, and erosion in the quality of human life.
The experienced powerlessness in the face of disaster is true for women who are empowered on film with witch's powers, and the ability to ride high on the wire as it once was. And still is for the super man who becomes the humanitarian we all want to know or to be.
Obama is already a huge disappointment, going back on one promise after another. Except, of course, the promise to invade Afghanistan; to destroy, to conquer, to take command through what ever means possible. That he once promised to hear and act upon the pain of ordinary citizens (the community) means that he knows what is right. That he goes back on his word means that he doesn't care to hear and respond. And it makes him a more potent enemy of the people than Bush, who presented the truth without the glory of being idealized.
And in the pursuit of some imagined need that this third world country, Afghanistan seems to pose for this "miracle" President and not for the rest of the world, the U.S. administration on high, elicits the young who are the life blood of hope, of possible change and potential ability for us to escape from the horrors of impending universal destruction, which is on the minds of people everywhere.
Imagine a world without war. Imagine films without World War II as the main attraction. Would film have survived?
Imagine a world where War stops, and men and woman come home. Imagine if all those young and middle aged people don't have the military as a possible place to gain/earn money.
Imagine if the military budget is naught.
What would happen to the value of the dollar?
Imagine if more people lived into middle and old age.
How would the ruling elite address the problem of overpopulation right here in the U.S.A.?
Think of the unemployment problem, think of the scientific problems,
think of the problem of spreading the wealth.
What if Joan Rivers and Donald Trump and their TV shows promoting the value, the glory of wealth were deemed immoral, taken off the air and the participants were put in jail for excessive accumulation of wealth.
Image if being wealthy were a crime, punishable in a court of law.
Imagine if murder and torture were not a potential source of empowerment, but the heinous crimes that they are.
Imagine if we didn't need witches and supermen and vampires with all their variety of changes and bizarre empowerment, to gain control over ourselves and restore the fragile links of love, of honest enjoyable, competition, of debate, of conflict resolution without violent or quasi-violent behaviors.
Imagine if film focused on the real feelings of fragility that we all feel, and brought creative solutions into the vacuous world of ideas that dominate our films, our media, our minds.
Imagine,
Films, the battleground for our survival, filled with attractive provocatove ideas and genuine feelings portrayed through artistic media that it portends to be.
Linda Z
WBAI Women's Collective
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