{"id":4866,"date":"2015-10-13T18:12:37","date_gmt":"2015-10-13T18:12:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelwinn.org\/?p=4866"},"modified":"2015-10-31T18:21:28","modified_gmt":"2015-10-31T18:21:28","slug":"1984-heres-what-it-looks-like-blacklist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelwinn.org\/tu-maltido-amor\/2015\/10\/13\/1984-heres-what-it-looks-like-blacklist\/","title":{"rendered":"1984? Here’s what it looks like: Blacklist"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night I abused myself with\u00a05 episodes of \u00a0Blacklist,<\/em>\u00a0 a paen to the CIA, FBI and\u00a0other\u00a0pro-military, pro-capitalist propaganda that pings a list of hot button pseudo-feminist values in a graphic novel format. I suffered this un-climactic\u00a0jerk-off to understand what disgusts me\u00a0about scoring for crappy tv shows. It’s not because I’m\u00a0no longer in\u00a0touch with culture or my hand isn’t steady. I’m reading Bukowski!<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

It took 3\u00a0three episodes to get\u00a0what’s going on in the show. I kept waiting for\u00a0the story and I fell asleep during parts of the 4th and\u00a0gave up entirely during\u00a0the 5th episode. There is nothing going on.\u00a0\u00a0There’s only tension and interest created by visual and audio spectacle and an underlying theme justifying\u00a0capital punishment, warfare and violent competition, with women playing power roles.<\/p>\n

Stylewise, the show’s an animated comic book with\u00a0video images of live actors rather than cartoon drawings. Music\u00a0makes an A\/V comic book without a compelling story possible. S<\/del>ans<\/em>\u00a0music, this show has no continuity, doesn’t hold interest, there’s no story. Stories can be propaganda, values are always implicit if not explicit but media without a compelling story is overtly propaganda.<\/p>\n

Comic books are as important and valuable as any other way to tell a story. A comic book story\u00a0can be great, entertaining, enlightening, exciting, enriching, delightful. A TV show or movie following a comic book format, for instance, Tarantino’s films can be cool. But using music as a special effect to laver feelings,\u00a0like lard, on a slab of bad writing is abusive and should be punished but for commitment to freedom of expression. Even so…<\/p>\n

Without a commercial sponsor, what is being sold in this particular kind of media is the militaristic, capitalist values it glorifies. Who pays for it? Who benefits from perpetuating these values? Take a look at the backers. The\u00a0Blacklist<\/em> criminalizes anti-establishment villains while it glorifies establishment\u00a0authority, capitalism and warfare and it seems weirdly asexual\u00a0and counter-romantic. However, using the title, Blacklist,\u00a0<\/em>has a specific anti-progressive effect: it defuses associations with another Blacklist, that of former U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy and his buddy, Richard Nixon, a real blacklist that purged the motion picture industry of most of its greatest and best writers, film makers and composers.<\/p>\n

When I say I never watch TV, I really mean, really, I haven’t\u00a0watched TV since 1960. \u00a0I only go to movie theaters when friends ask me, which isn’t often since I don’t encourage it. I’ve\u00a0seen many films. In my 3rd and 4th years of high school, I stayed home and watched independent TV broadcasters in LA, who at that time, having no other programming, ran nothing but old films 24\/7; every film made since 1915. I fell in love with cinema and went to college and got a degree in it and made films for many years. I’ve seen many films many\u00a0times and I also watched a lot of early TV; Edward R. Murrow, Skelton, Ceasar, Benny, Gleason, Groucho, Sullivan, Reiner; live<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It sickens\u00a0me to see the potential of the broadcast media ignored. I understand that\u00a0telling the truth would get in the way of business as usual because art requires authenticity. But I miss the art. \u00a0Watching this Blacklist\u00a0<\/em>crap last night, I felt a\u00a0kinship with\u00a0Carson McCullers, W.C. Fields, Samuel Clemens and Henry Bukowski, all of whom drank themselves to death. I wanted to drink a pint of whiskey. It’s not just that the media is propaganda and stupidly written and poorly performed and directed and edited but that there are sufficient numbers of viewers that don’t know better than to take in this crap, and from this I infer there’s all these uneducated people populating the world now, who don’t know the difference, who\u00a0literally wouldn’t know Debussy from Darwin beyond the name.<\/p>\n

It’s not easy for\u00a0people who were not adolescent in the 40s or 50s \u00a0to understand the relationship between culture and story-telling media even though they may appreciate the wit of filmmakers of the early 20th century. They\u00a0appreciate Casablanca<\/em> and The World of Apu<\/em> and Citizen Kane<\/em>\u00a0but they miss the connection with culture these works enjoyed because the connection between media and culture\u00a0has changed.\u00a0The\u00a0\u00a0propaganda of law enforcement melodramas is a world apart from the media world of these \u00a0films. The satire of John Stewart about things\u00a0we can now only\u00a0laugh about and\u00a0“reality TV” that are just freak shows doesn’t connect with a community in action about the ideals of the culture. \u00a0As Lenny Bruce put\u00a0\u00a0it during his obscenity trial, “if something is mostly\u00a0art with maybe a little shit in it, that’s alright\u00a0but, when it’s the other way around, then it’s shit.”<\/p>\n

\"US<\/a>
US Federal Budget – 2014<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We don’t\u00a0laugh about what’s at stake but some\u00a0good could come from\u00a0laughing about the absurdity of the $149 billion US Navy budget. It’s ridiculous. Imagine all those hugely expensive steel ships, submarines and jet planes pouring greenhouse\u00a0gasses into the air and creating nuclear fission waste \u00a0like there’s no tomorrow and what’s funniest is that they are literally creating no-tomorrow. The irony is that we don’t need those ships and airplanes and nuclear weapons, they’re a\u00a0useless liability in light of current technology, like the aging copper wire telephone infrastructure. The good thing about the U.S. Navy is that it does have this absurd cost that is dragging the quality life down for most Americans and we can’t avoid seeing how really stupid it is. So it let’s us see real clear that the reason \u00a0we can’t get rid of the US Navy isn’t because it’s iconic but simply because the political mouths all this money feeds from the billions Congress\u00a0allots them \u00a0from the federal treasury allows this organization to promote it’s survival on shows like Blacklist, <\/em>thus\u00a0<\/em>perpetuating the U.S.Navy and it’s not really anyone’s intention that this wastefulness\u00a0helps to \u00a0kill our chances of survival. And the funny thing is that we are this organization and we are self-destructing. Praise the lord and pass the Scotch. I’ll take mine with some yoga.<\/p>\n

…30…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night I abused myself with\u00a05 episodes of \u00a0Blacklist,\u00a0 a paen to the CIA, FBI and\u00a0other\u00a0pro-military, pro-capitalist propaganda that pings a list of hot button pseudo-feminist values in a graphic novel format. I suffered this un-climactic\u00a0jerk-off to understand what disgusts me\u00a0about scoring for crappy tv shows. It’s not because I’m\u00a0no longer in\u00a0touch with culture or … Continue reading 1984? Here’s what it looks like: Blacklist<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwinn.org\/tu-maltido-amor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwinn.org\/tu-maltido-amor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwinn.org\/tu-maltido-amor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwinn.org\/tu-maltido-amor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwinn.org\/tu-maltido-amor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4866"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwinn.org\/tu-maltido-amor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4913,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwinn.org\/tu-maltido-amor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4866\/revisions\/4913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwinn.org\/tu-maltido-amor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwinn.org\/tu-maltido-amor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwinn.org\/tu-maltido-amor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}