The Handmaid's #Fail : Big Brother and the Cinema

Requisite Reading: Big Brother | Nevertheless They Persisted

In 21st century America, as it is in most of the First World, invention is now the mother of necessity. As the Neil Degrasse Tyson fandom may instruct us : “Demand Evidence and Think Critically.”

What of (?)

Who can really say? 

“Believe All Survivors” – I am told. #DreamCrazy - says the justice-profiteering of one Colin Kaepernick and his lucrative Nike deal.

Watch the NFL on any given Sunday and tell me that unscrupulous adventuring (#winning) is not the Holy Grail of the Digital-Industrial age, at least in its low-brow and commercial sense.

High-mindedly speaking, 21st Century culture seems to believe itself something of a Hero for having shed off the old skins of chivalry, patriotism, and the moral laws and metaphysics of the Philosophers.

Previously obscure malcontents score huge with social justice by exposing and defacing embarrassing remnants of our primitive, Law-centric culture. Statues of the Ten Commandments, especially any near state property, can expect a very minimal lifespan.

Grievous sins against the Social Conscience must be remedied.

#Wokeness may be fairly defined as the belief that 21st Century humanity has effectively graduated from archaic conceptions of Heroism and Tragedy. History is the story of oppressors and their victims; fascists and anti-fascists.

But why so many laws in a society so critical of #Authority? Could an ever-replenishing #need ever be satiated? Invention for its own sake is the very definition of idiocy, is it not?

 #Sacrifice can be advantage without losing any of its purity, I am told.

He #kneeled when asked to #stand. (Money in the bank) 

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford had “nothing to gain”, and so Justice Brett Kavanaugh was a college rapist.

The Handmaids #Fail

If our “needs” are not natural, or are, at least, subservient to invention, as our growing Technocracy would have us believe, then what are they? 

By deduction, we may only arrive at one conclusion:

Necessity is not the outcome of naturally occurring phenomena, originating in a state indissoluble and so inappropriate for the Scientific Method, that is to say, from the center (soul)

Tragedy, says the Handmaid, may be generated by conscious will, independent of circumstance. Imagine what Shakespeare would have written if he had the Internet.

Misery may be envisioned if short in experience. Moral instruction need not follow deviant and so shameful departures from the Moral Law, itself a tribute to the dreaded #Patriarchy.

Grief, or at least, what can be gained from it, transcend Space and Time, ever to be re-dramatized in increasingly gaudy and self-flagellating narratives.

 Grief Porn, says my submission to the Urban Dictionary, is Tragedy without the Impetus - Misery, utilized for instruction.

It is, what our Handmaid’s would contend, instruction for our betterment (catechism, more or less)

#ArrangedHeroism is something our #woke story-tellers tell us is no different from its Tragic counterpart, if only more expedient. Why wait upon the Muse when the #Muse may be summoned at our pleasure? There’s revenge to be had and fascists to fight.

 The Stories we need

It seems inevitable that Hollywood and the cinematic art form would, subject to the laws of entropy and megalomania run amok, eventually eradicate the Fourth Wall, leaving the escapism of its original intent behind it.

Watch any movie from the classic era (generally in black and white), and you’ll notice a sharp contrast between what were clearly theatrics and what is now an acrid realism.

Big Brother at the Movies is surveillance at the behest of #progress; essentially self-defeat for the betterment of society.

The “movies we need” (e.g. Black Panther), are the art-forms no one asked for; or, rather, the realism that surpasses #reality. Tragedy, apotheosis, and redemption are inefficiencies of the archaic past.

Classically speaking, true catharsis presents something of a conflict of interest to the modern story. Forgiveness and redemption are both effective deterrents to Story-for-Instruction. The Fourth Wall was always merely an irritant to the activist and the narrative arc an impediment to the #science of story-telling.

Believe all survivors

As truly unnerving as it was fascinating and cinematic, the macabre-circus masked as a Supreme Court-justice confirmation hearing some several weeks past, is a perfect case-study of the effects Big Brother has had on everyday civic jurisprudence.

The Presumption of innocence has apparently shared its fate with the lifespan of the Fourth Wall. I was told that all survivors were to be believed. I was told that a #survivor gained such inscrutable impunity by his or her claim to inheritance. Sin –by – demographic is substance, as tragedy can be envisioned, and victimhood assumed outright.

Again – one must shudder at the sheer inefficiency of our Law-centric past. Who needs a Constitution when all guilt is self-evident; being, at heart, a group-association?

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, you have to think, would present something of a profound conundrum (if properly understood) to those of so #woke as to transcend the Moral Law and peer through the pale of justice.

What, to even a semi-literate man or woman, mere decades ago, was pure and simple Tragedy, must now present something of a Labyrinth of competing interests.

Under this Marxist lens, does the credibility of the #survivor take precedence over the interminably oppressed or the wrongfully accused?

When our Judge was up for trial, the Handmaids poured it on. This was why other #survivors never came forward, I was told. Defend the accused and one is impeding inter-sectional justice; justice being no longer blind but possessing an x-ray vision.

#ArrangedHeroism must also allow for pre-existing guilt; villainy being paramount to any proper #Tragedy.

The Patriarchy gave us trial-by-jury, the few-and-the-woke, trial-by-science. Kavanaugh, poor bastard, possessed all the ingredients of a chauvinist; that is to say a man of privilege; a rapist, no doubt.

Big Brother and the Cinema

Remove the Fourth wall from literature, cinema, and dramatization, and one will likely find, as our society has discovered, that #content may be generated for every anecdote in the known (or unknown) universe. If you have logged into Netflix lately, you may understand my gist.

Necessity, subservient to invention, has amounted to an effective end to Art in the service of the Human Condition.

Modern American cinema, urged on by an overarching voyeurism, and magnified to outrageous proportions under the patronage of modern capitalism, has become a form of antichrist not only to the art-form it devoured (cinema – as –theater) but to the broader culture that shelters it.

Profound is the irony of a billion-dollar industry-monolith producing an anti-corporate, cautionary tale on the danger of monopolies and the autocratic tendency. Let us ward off strongmen and the Patriarchy by the wielding of #Authority. Only the #woke need proceed. 

So wary of authority are our modern cosplaying autocrats that they have seemingly become the villains they envision. Having breached that indissoluble essence that divides literature from pornography, the super-altruists of the 21st Century have effectively opted for the nuclear option; taking true and redemptive catharsis down with their misery.

Why would any of these Handmaids forgive their oppressors, re-discover due process, and stop writing shitty literature?

As a Handmaid, one is the Title Role, the Central Hero, the chiefly oppressed. The Market calls for more content. The Law is a stumbling block for the stupid and the easily guiled. Our #Heroes kneel when they’re asked to stand.

She had nothing to gain. The inevitable book deal, charitable donations, and lucrative speaking engagements are The Hero’s due reward and the rightful property of the #oppressed.

The Handmaid’s #Fail, ironically, is the presumption of innocence, but not as the right of the accused. It is the defacing of the Law as put forth in the commandment; thou shalt not bear false witness.

Its stories are contrivances, its literature, pornography. 

Something like Chicken Soup for the Fascists’ Soul, the surveillance state, in its cinematic form, sees through character. #Heroes and #Villains and nothing in between.

As Big Brother continues to oversee the industrialization of the theater and America further confuses #reality for cinema (and vice versa), inspiration, or more plainly, the Muse, will exist only as a slave to ego, careerism and celebrity worship. . If Netflix doesn’t have a subgenre for “strong women”, then, mark my words, it’s coming.

 So #DreamCrazy . . . #PunchANazi . . #JoinTheReistance. Be the #Hero you were born to be. The Muse is our bitch. We’ve got a fever with just one cure.

Give us the stories we need. 

 ** props to my wife for the disturbing artwork **

 “This deliberately nurtured hatred then spreads to all that is alive, to life itself, to the world with its colors, sounds, and shapes, to the human body. The embittered art of the 20th century is perishing as a result of this ugly hate, for art is fruitless without love. 

In the East art has collapsed because it has been knocked down and trampled upon, but in the West the fall has been voluntary, a decline into a contrived and pretentious quest where the artist, instead of attempting to reveal the divine plan, tries to put himself in the place of God.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn