George Dafermos' Weblog

Saturday, July 10, 2004

fahrenheit 911: another form of control or mass aneasthesia?

robert paterson blogs about michael moore's fahrenheit 9/11, and how the movie's distributor changed its plans for canada due to an agitating blog post in which will pate complained about the narrow distribution of the film .

wow! i would never expect to see a film company change its distribution plans because of a handful of blogs asked for it. Right now i can't help but thinking that maybe i should have done the same a while ago in order to get to have the corporation (which i haven't yet seen) and michel bauwens' technocalypse distributed to theatres and dvd rentals across greece.

and also this proves once again that blogging is a very powerful form of bottom-up marketing in a market heavily dependent upon bloodless-electronic-bots and corporate androids for communication purposes. what a welcomed change indeed!

as for the movie, which i haven't yet had the chance to watch, i feel that moore has nailed it once again. the only things that vexes me though is that people seem to need a movie to make them go "yeah, let's stop this motherfucker demagogue from distorting our democratic ideals and manipulating our supposedly healthy societies", but then, somehow dissapointingly i must confress, we all forget about it and get on with our lives as usual. in the end, no real change has taken place.

of course, the realisation that politicians and their entourage are corrupt and they are not there to serve the public is by itself a huge step forward, yet this step has been taken a very long time ago, and things still remain largely unaltered. How could have they changed though, would one wonder, when the system principally responsible for masterminding, incumbating, and implementing these political formulas is still in place?

i don't know, and maybe the influence these movies exert over popular conscioussess is by necessity limited in my case since i live so far away from the states, but were i to launch a full-scale attack to the system of values and beliefs that ought to be replaced with something more imaginative, democratic, and humane, i'd go first critiquing these movies for they are nothing but another form of control. they energise us into going to the theatres, but they almost never manage to awaken us by such an order of magnitude that we will never again accept things as given.

as a sidenote, michael moore said he has no problem with his movie being copied and distributed on the Net for non-commercial purposes. nice marketing trick, and a very effective one. for by doing so he appears to be not your typical money-greedy film producer, and instead he comes across as a very concerned person who cares more about spreading the message than making shitloads of money. at the end of the day, as you may suspect too, this kind of Internet distribution boosts sales and profits. and it does boost profits because it makes good buiness sense. give 'em a teaser and they 'll come back for more. give 'em the movie and rest assured that many more will flock to the theatres to see the movie everyone is talking about. besides, a movie is much more pleasant to watch on the big screen than on a 17" computer sreen, no? very glad that some film-makers get it at last.

1:53:13 AM

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