Modern Cinema and the Death of History

by Christopher Barr

 

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

                     - Søren Kierkegaard

There is a movement in modern day society to erase the past from existence.  A government and corporate alliance to stop people from learning about the past, as usual, people generally think this way of looking at the world is hip and right.  They are ignorant, not even given the chance to know otherwise, of the vast and important history the human race has, in all its ups and downs.

Sure they might have mildly heard of Shakespeare and Plato, do they know anything about them?  Do they know about The Republic and Hamlet, the Odyssey and Ulysses, more importantly, without tooting one’s horn, should they know?  Should the young even know or care about any of this?  It was the German Philosopher, Hegel that said, “The one thing we did learn about history is we didn't learn anything from history.”

 
What it must be like to live a life without any desire to learn about history beyond the years you have spent on this planet. How empty and unfulfilling that must be.  Yet this is modern man and women, a species without a history or a need to know where it all comes from.

This is the genius of modern day propaganda, where they have drained the life force out of people in such a way; they don’t even have the energy to look back.  They are so pressured to look good and consume on a detached level that they themselves are marooned on an island of text messages and tweets and avoiding human connection.  People have become not good at being what it is to be people.

What is human connection if not the death of capitalism?  Peace is something we all want but that is death to capitalism, so is people getting along with people.  It’s unfortunate but we belong to a society addicted to war and hatred because capitalism can only exist within these parameters.  It can’t exist in peace and harmony because within those parameters we don’t need machines manufactured for the killing of other people, or clothes and things to help make insecure people feel secure enough, to seek something that doesn’t actually cost anything.  Love and human connection, these things are free but have been sold to us by greedy corporations to fool us into thinking that will make us happy.
 
The death of history giving birth to hollow consumers, people desiring emptiness by the people they meet.  They desire those that won’t challenge them, but most importantly, won’t remind them of their servitude to the consumer system we are all slaves to.  This is why being young and staying that way are pushed in modern society.  It’s not only good enough to be young, but one must attempt to be that as well.  To be naïve and not knowing equals being young, there are 30 something’s and 40 something’s in arrested development by choice in order to be seen as young and not knowing.  Knowing and awareness means a form of wisdom and that means age.

 

The devastating problem here is; if people continue this line of not knowing and corporations continue to dumb them down in order to get them to buy things they don’t actually need, then we might actually lose Shakespeare and Freud and the poems of T.S. Eliot.  Maybe that’s fitting in this New World Order because all those men along with George Orwell and Aldous Huxley warned us all of a future of control and manipulation.
 
So, if this is going to be the case, what will it be to live a meaningful life with no past to reflect on and no sense of history?  Does history give us richness to our life or are we left with no lesson at all?  History is absolutely paramount to not only the survival of the mind but that of the species.  To rob the youth of that is a form of abuse that I believe has not yet been documented.  The reason being, the profit that corporations and governments make from this naïve way of thinking and easily controlled way of thinking, is too high for a reverse in discourse to take place.
 
There is an excuse to stay dumb because a lot of us work for the very institutions that oppress our freedom, or we work for companies that are in the oil industry thus turning a blind eye away from the ripping apart and rebuilding of the middle east to fit our own corporate image, in spite of the millions of innocent lives that are lost in the progress of freedom.  We don’t want to hear about babies being nailed to walls but we’re cool about making all that oil money.

 

70’s cinema was about reflection on history and the dangers of not doing anything about it.  Apocalypse Now, All the President’s Men are but a few selection of films that challenged their audiences about doing what was right.  Network ripped apart and exposed multimedia and corporate America for what it really is.  Many others including Taxi Driver and the Conversation spoke of an American decline.  But then the 80's arrived and with it, a decline of alternative thinking right up to the early 90's as a result of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Desert Storm Invasion of Iraq. Then with the death of the man that was thought to be the poster boy of 'fuck that shit' politics killed himself and then the spread of the Internet.  Power over the minds of the people came back to the capitalists.

 

The late 90’s fought back in cinema, with The Matrix, exposing philosophical notions on the nature of reality, along with the Truman Show and Dark City, American Beauty and Fight Club exposing the fallout of consumer society.  As much as I loved them, I think the X-Men and Gladiator were a big ‘shut up’ to that way of cinematic story telling, leading to a decade and then some of superhero movies.   These movies can be fun, exciting and in some cases revealing, as well as being an escape from the real world that the late 90’s wanted to expose.

Superheroes have a past and some, like the horror film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, are very much a part of the time of their inception.  Now these origins are reworked into modern times to make them relevant in a time with no history.  The odd thing about superheroes is they weren’t relevant in their time.  They were allegories, which were the best thing about them, but they were artificial saviors when God and country seemingly failed.  They were still meaningful in their quest to save the world, now they are hollow and weak for the most part, with the exception of V for Vendetta and the Watchmen.

Now we live in a time of no meaning other than artificial.  Where we see CGI robots cry on screen and we weep with them, as if identifying with their plight even though they are not real.  We live in a time we are scared to death of a past that most of us no nothing about.  We claim to ‘look to the future’, believe ‘that everything happens for a reason’ and that god is looking over us all, but not knowing about what that means.  We live in a bumper sticker thinking society where we all congratulate each other on incites that are empty and flat.

Movies are going to keep churning out Michael Bay vacuous blockbusters and remakes and reboots, that claim to want to recapture a past that’s not past but only present.  We, as easily led consumers, will be told what movie to see or what ideas to think based on the highest level of advertising exposure, but I hope and dream that films like Mud, Before Midnight, the forth coming films Gravity and The Wolf of Wall Street, along with other more challenging yet entertaining films continue to remind us of a past.

We can’t say we just want to live in the now and be knowing.  We can’t just read philosopher Slavoj Zizek without knowing Hegel, Marx, Freud and Lacan, all men dead long before most of us were born.  This notion of not learning from the past is absurd; an attempt at maintaining youth for its own sake is absurd.  The past is absolutely paramount to any level of progress.

“What’s past is prologue.”

From The Tempest by William Shakespeare