LONDON HAS FALLEN and the Ongoing War Against the American People

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON MARCH 06

There are some minor spoilers but I promise you, it really doesn’t matter anyway.

London Has Fallen was a mediocre propagandized American action movie that is a sequel to the equally mediocre propagandized American action movie, Olympus Has Fallen.  London Has Fallen certainly has more action than its predecessor, more explosions, more killing, which should make most of the American movie going audience elated as they sit on their butter-stained theater seats and salivate as the unbridled jingoism, proudly parades the screen from beginning to end.

The movie follows the bellicose Secret Service Top Agent Mike Banning, who’s in charge of the Presidential Protection Division, again as he aggressively fights to save his Commander and Chief, the President of the United States of America.  Again he’s saving him from the evil, character-less terrorists that are hell bent on destroying America’s way of life, even on British soil this time around.

The British Prime Minister died after mysterious circumstances which led the leaders of the free world to conjoin in London to attend his funeral.  Here is when the evil-doers decide to make their move by blowing up various London City land marks in a massive ambush to kill all the world’s leaders.  The Canadian, French, Italian and Japanese Prime Ministers, through separate simultaneous attacks, are discarded as the focus to save the United States President from assassination is well, the only focus the movie cares to focus on.

Aamir Barkawi is the terrorist mastermind behind all the attacks because of revenge against the west for bombing his daughter’s wedding in Pakistan.  This massive explosion, executed by a US military drone, almost killed Barkawi but he got away. Barkawi is an arms dealer, said to be responsible for destabilizing many poor countries in order to sell them weapons to fight each other with.  Create the demand then create the supply, I thought that was the United States’ foreign policy monetary enterprise.  In London Has Fallen the evil terrorists are the one’s initiating all the instability around the world apparently, just because they are evil.    

London Has Fallen is pure propaganda, not only politically but also deeply psychologically.  This movie will further the USA down that deep dark xenophobic hole and continue to blind its own citizens to the realities of how the world really is.  There are many moments in the movie that I wouldn’t want to be a member of any region of the Middle East.  Not because what the movie is espousing is right but because how effective it is at convincing white people to fear anyone of color.  There’s a scene toward the end of the movie where Gerard Butler’s character Banning beats a terrorist to near death while telling him the problem with “you people” as he punches harder and harder.  Banning is inflaming a desire of many Americans to hurt an enemy that the corporate operated media machine tells them is an enemy.  The Military Industrial Complex along with the office of the President tell the American people that an enemy wants to hurt them and their families.  That enemy is simply known as ‘terrorist’ which is a brush that the Government and its Corporate Media conspirator can paint anywhere they want to paint it.

The war carried out by the America/Corporate elite is inside not outside its borders.  The war is against the every people who blindly believe, because they are told day-in and day-out, that America is the greatest country on the planet Earth.  Yet there is no real evidence that supports this belief.  This is also why religion is so powerful in America because it too is not supportable when it is subject to the scrutiny of evidence. Most Americans, certainly not all, fashion their lives around a fantasy that is presented to them by the very institutions that have sworn to protect them.

Many of the citizens of America are not treated with any kind of human dignity.  When this crucial necessity is waylaid in support of control, this becomes indicative to a decline of a civilization.  The only real reason why it’s hanging on as long as it has is because of a mass tsunami of distraction available to the average American citizen.  The War on Drugs is a joke, it’s a political slogan that’s been reduced to a weathered stained bumper sticker stuck to the backs of 30 year old rusted trailers.  Americans are on drugs, they are on illegal drugs and legal big pharma drugs and are convinced there’s an actual difference.  They are on the drug of alcohol which provides the necessary hostility required for them to fight each other over their ludicrous beliefs.  They are on one of the biggest drugs of them all, they are addicted to television, with its sports, its MMA fighting, and now throw in social media.  They are addicted to the detached nature of the cell phone and the banal music that it plays.

Sadly the biggest drug of them all is America itself.  The country of America is a drug, a very persuasive drug that is quite rapidly addicting the world.  It’s illusion of freedom is too strong in order to shock this nation out of its sedated lethargy.  Hope exists in movies now, in video games, in the flowing vapid river of Facebook posts, hope exists at lottery ticket booths and fictionalized Church sessions, it exists during binge-watching a horde of TV shows that dramatize our desires for a better world, or better people using actors that read scripts written by boardroom writers.  

What can we really do to get out of this hole that our leaders have led us so cunningly into?  What can we do to un-do what has been done?  What do we want, what are we really doing here?  We want centralization, we are in a pursuit for relevancy.  Is that our human legacy outside of the very few that reach beyond the limitations of the emotional human project?  Is Newton, Tesla and Einstein the exception, among few others compared to the human population entering this mass idea of a civilization, to the devastating rule that we are all doomed to be perpetually ignorant?  Is the majority of us chasing ghosts and angels as we attempt to understand the nature of reality or are we not even doing that?  

There are so many people whose potential development has been systematically neutralized by the education system, the media and their corporate and governmental sponsors.  In life we are told we are free and are able to get away with what we want but that’s not an actual reality.  Most of us are shut down to which we seek vengeance, not with the potential of our minds, no, we retreat to virtual simulation to save us from feeling pathetic.  We live on the internet, we vent through video games.

What has happened to us?  We are sick, we are desperate, we are lonely, we are loveless, and we are strangers among friends.  We are separated within crowds, the raw reality is that we have been abandoned, not by ideas but the idea of ideas, we have been left marooned on our little individual planets under the belief that we are connected even though there is very little to qualify that. 

London Has Fallen, with its main character almost behaving nihilistically, was a movie, but underneath all its gloss and so called glory, its abandon us all, it’s a movie that acted irresponsibly, it’s knowingly misleading its audience into the belief of ‘it’s us against them’ then it goes on to say not only ‘fuck them’ but ‘fucking kill every last one of them’.  This level of detachment in a seemingly and certainly a celebrated civilized society speaks volumes of the effectiveness of its propaganda machine.

((Sorry I wanted to go on about how it’s all going to turn around when people clue in to how they are being misled….but I just couldn’t.  I don’t want to be a pessimist or a cynic but I just can’t see an out and I don’t want this article to end with the kind of hope for the future the propagandized film London Has Fallen has falsely left us with.))

DEADPOOL and Living in the World with a Foot Dipped in Animation

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON FEBRUARY 22 

“Time to make the chimi-fucking-changas!!

Spoilers alert!!
Get with it, it's a fucking reality

Deadpool was a film about friendship and love and communication and (anti) heroism and punishment and revitalization and sort of about Jesus and revenge and love…….

Deadpool was about a guy… (Created by comic book artists Rod Liefeld and writer Fabian Nicieza)

Deadpool is about an ex-mercenary named Wade Wilson that is diagnosed with terminal cancer, “El Cancer”.  His girlfriend Vanessa wants to find a cure while all he wants to do is get away from her so he can die painfully without her being around him.  Wade’s relationship with Vanessa was established through a gauntlet of lustful sexual moments that helped define their association.  It wasn’t until Wade lost her that love for her became his real defining moment. 
  

Wade went into the Weapon X program, the same as Wolverine, and was subject to various stages of high-level torture to induce a mutation believed to possibly be within him.  He ended up being impervious to death.  His body also became scared everywhere.

Deadpool was a movie that knew it was a movie and it knew that other movies are just movies.  This meta-realization was littered throughout the insane story line of the reality of the Deadpool production movie within the fictional Deadpool movie.  Actor Ryan Reynolds was mentioned in the movie by a character played by Ryan Reynolds.  This self-realization could have backfired easily because the audience generally go to movies to suspend their disbelief, they go there to be lied to.  So when a movie tells them that they are watching a movie and that they are being deceived, this generally doesn’t go over too well.  The extreme case would be a priest telling his flock at Sunday morning mass that the whole thing is made up.  People don’t like their illusions disturbed in any case, they want the lie because the lie breeds comfort and momentarily removes fear.

“Let’s hope these guys are wearing their brown pants.”

Because Deadpool was so filled with comedy bits, the reality of its fiction became somewhat camouflaged behind all the laughter.  This movie is post-structuralist as it introduces its audience to a very contemporary idea about the world and how we assign our symbolic reality to it.  Deadpool is the vanishing mediator between the fictional-fiction and the reality-fiction, the fiction of the fantasy and the fiction of celebrity.  This conflict between the two fictional worlds, the theoretical abstraction and its empirical negation is resolved by a sort of cinematic fusion.  Deadpool the character breaks the fourth wall and talks to the audience about the movie and even the production of the movie, its special effects, its budget, and its long pre-production.  Deadpool even gave a nod to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off during the post credits scene because that glorious 80’s comedy broke its fourth wall as well.  Breaking the fourth wall isn’t necessarily new, Shakespeare did it a number of times in his plays just over four hundred years ago, the difference here is Deadpool is crazy, so we may very well be a figment of his imagination and his desire to be glorified.  Essentially he may just be talking to himself and we just think he’s talking to us.

“Hashtag driveby”.

When Hamlet breaks the forth wall to speak to the audience, no other character is aware that he’s doing that.  The same goes for Ferris Bueller but with Deadpool he’s asked by Colossus who’s even talking to.  Deadpool points to the camera, the window into the movie theater and says, “them”.  It’s important here to understand that part of Wade Wilson’s forced mutation was brain damage.  We’re all going along with Deadpool because he’s funny and pretty cool as he kicks ass.  Under the comedy and the witty remakes is a very angry man that not only wants to kill people to get his revenge, he wants to knowingly, and quite overtly, to do this in style.  The point here is he’s enjoying this.  He’s climbing the mountain of bad guys to get the big bad but he’s, along the way, having way too much fun doing it.

We should be concerned by this, not because it’s a movie about a guy that wants to avenge his continuous torture by a villain named, Ajax, but rather he’s implicated us as an audience in his actions.  It’s rare that a movie involves its audience in such a personal and equally sinister way.  The movie Deadpool is a declaration of our narcissism, it is our justification to be mean and have fun doing it.  We are all jacked up as he kills and jokes around.  We enjoy his immortality as he gets shot and heals.

This self-aware topical movie is recognizing the sort of Matrix we are all living, not only within society but within our own minds.  Facebook and twitter are simulated virtual avenues for us to express our government and corporate manipulated thoughts.  Everything isn’t as real as we are lead to believe.  Most beliefs in society are fabricated to either distract the population so the ruling class can control without transparency or so we as individuals can get up in the morning and work for companies that essentially rob our freedom.

The question is, what is up with illusions?  We lie to ourselves….period, we do it, this is not a debate…. we do it.  Why do we feel the need biologically and more a matter of the brain, psychologically to lie about our neurological experience?  We certainly don’t know this on a decided level or from a conscious experience.  This is all happening below the level of our psychological conscious reach.  We have no immediate access to these neurological sub-structures of the mind.  Most of us believe that the surface, what we believe is our full mind, is our control panel to all of it. 

We are not in control, we are only recklessly in the belief that we are in control of our own beliefs.  But why are these beliefs easily accepted by the mind?  Is the mind and what we believe about our version of the reality of the world, together?  There are debates about politics, environmental issues and certainly individual problems but why is the mind so easily convincing?  How does one set of people believe that we all die and go to heaven because Jesus says so, and others burn hearts on Central American pyramids for polytheistic gods and find that acceptable?

Who are we if we are always thinking different thoughts, not only of ourselves, but of how we see our world.  We are not reliable agents of what we think about our world because it is flowing like a river, it is changing, I am changing as I write this.  We want concrete, we want finite, we want a blanket, we want to mentally predict the future, oddly, of our immediate experience.

Deadpool was about symbolic arbitrariness of life, it was about how the fantasy that we think we see in the theater is in fact more than that.  The crazy psychotic nature of this character is a real reflection of ourselves and our own selfless desires to be in total control, not only of our thoughts but how these thoughts anthropomorphise in our own perceptive version of the real world. 

Deadpool was a great time at the cinema, it was rewarding, culturally, to see a character call out and pass judgment on the very platform that it stood on.  For that my favorite thing about Deadpool, the movie version, is that it was brave.  It was incredibly exciting to see a character mouth off at the audience with such glee.  This beauty and the beast story us lovingly and has set us all up for more.

Who are you?  What would Derrida do?  If you got this far then you can go a little further.  Our very language is a representation of reality.  As I write this , this test, and you read this, how close to reality does each of us arrive?  If you got down this far, you are just being polite or you are interested, or curious.  If you have something to say then you should say it.  We get Deadpool at this point, do we?  He’s a self-indulgent narcissistic military machine that sort of changed his ways because he lost something he wanted. 

Is Deadpool not our own desire to be free?  I’m a writer writing about Deadpool like I think I know what I’m talking about.  Maybe I do, maybe I don’t, I’m under the illusion that I have an idea.  Sure I don’t know all that "Google" knows about the history of Deadpool, what I do know is this; Deadpool is a fucking psycho and I love that.  Deadpool is a catharsis in the pages of a comic and the film footage of the editors room,  He’s what we really want to be, not a hero, that Colossus goes on and on about.  Deadpool, and we love him for it (?), is a product of getting what we want, he’s a product of capitalism.

In the end, as much as we love him, what we are really celebrating about him is he’s a product, he’s a product of everything that we want, not what we need.  Deadpool was fun but he was also a sad reflection on the voyeuristic mirror of the state of modern day culture.  We all exist in a detected state at this point in our history.  We are connecting to simulations as Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard predicted.  

If you are still reading this then you are willing to go further.  What is Deadpool?

Deadpool is a product of capitalism, he’s a mercenary that kills for the fuck of it, he says it’s for revenge… In the end it's for love...  Keep reading....

WHAM! 

STAR WARS: The Force Awakens, Greatness and the Sad State of the Online Spoiler Phenomenon

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON DECEMBER.18, 2015

There aren't any spoilers in this article.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens was an action packed, delightful entertaining film to watch.  It was all the things we wanted from a return-to-form after the disasters that was the prequels.  This film was fun, not just as a Star Wars film but as a film standing on its own, it was a blast to watch.  The trailers let us know that we were in for a fun film and we weren’t let down.

The performances in this film were great, the action sequences that director J.J Abrams created were spectacular, and the John Williams score was goose-bump worthy throughout the film.  The practical effects were a welcomed addition to the CGI over-saturation of the prequels.  The film wasn’t only a fun film but it was incredibly funny, where all the funny moments were honest and deserving of their respective moments.

J.J Abrams got it.  As a Star Wars fan himself, he got not only what George did wrong with the prequels but what George did right with the original trilogy.  He painted his canvas with the original paint that George started with but also added his own colors and his own vision to this world from this galaxy far far away.  He was able to please the older fans while simultaneously welcoming a new generation of fans.  The brilliance of what he and his colossal team of actors, set designers, special effects creators and all other collaborators have done, was to introduce this world to the little boys and little girls who haven’t seen Star Wars before, while giving their parents who saw and loved the originals the same kind of delightful enjoyment.

The Force Awakens was a viscerally emotional film from an obvious nostalgic point of view but also an even more poignant contemporary point of view.  Rey, the main character of the film is its spine, she is its heart and she journeys to find the soul that we all loved from the originals.  She bridges the old with the new in a very Homer-esque way.  Joseph Campbell certainly grounded the mythology that was allegorized for thousands of years from our own history, which heavily influenced George Lucas to do a somewhat explainable mythology he created for his Flash Gordon inspired story that become Star Wars.

The character Finn who was a Stormtrooper turned defector, for all the right reasons, was an absolute delight in the film.  As we saw from the trailers, he was no longer willing to go along with the ‘First Order’, a new evil regime after the fall of the Empire.  BB-8, the main droid in the film was adorable but not enough to be annoying.  This little spinning droid had character and soul behind that one dark shaded lense of an eye.  The Millennium Falcon is still the best hunk of junk in the galaxy.  It was great to see Han Solo back in the seat and also to see Harrison Ford enjoying playing Han Solo again.  The Dark Side’s new front overlord Kylo Ren was multilayered, he was menacing, and he was a great advisory to the heroes of the film.  Walking in the footsteps of Darth Vader’s enormous legacy, Kylo Ren didn’t disappoint.  Also they didn’t overuse characters where a lesser filmmaker would have been more tempted to do so.    

The problem with the Star Wars: The Force Awakens isn’t even in the film, it’s in the culture we all live in, this social media saturation that we all call ‘progress’.  The big reveal in The Empire Strikes Back, when Luke is told by Darth Vader that he is his father would likely have never stayed tightly sealed as it did in 1980.  Today we live in a spoiler savvy culture where nothing is sacred, were almost everything is aired on the internet.  

Why is this?  Covert introversion?  The weak hide behind the safety of their computer screens and poke digital prods at faceless people that will never see who actually poked them.  We live in a culture of passive warfare that slithers in the darkness of social streaming.  We live in a culture where we no longer have to qualify anything we have an ‘opinion’ about.  We live in a culture where we have a long reaching voice, a voice that has never been as reaching.  Some of us post pictures of cats and silly things that dogs do, some of us post opinions about political matters that many of us really are not qualified to write about, but sadly a lot of us post things that overtly are written to spoil another person’s experience.

Many movie websites discussing Star Wars: The Force Awakens have been quite vigilant about deleting comments that spoil various plot points in the film.  So now we are getting these losers commenting on topics that are not Star Wars related about Star Wars plot points just to spoil the film for people who haven’t seen it yet.  These are people sitting and saying to themselves that they know this particular plot point or exciting reveal in the film and then desire to beat the film to the punch, so to speak.  Sort of like Santa sitting around the Christmas tree and shouting out to a kid what the actual present he is about to open, but yet in this case it’s detached and removed from confrontation and accountability.

Lots of people slip up by saying that Bruce Willis is a ghost throughout The Sixth Sense, (sorry to those who haven’t seen the film but it’s been 16 years for the love of god).  Then you get those people that aren’t slipping up, they want to spoil it for the rest of us.  They want to attach their fantasy of reality to what they think reality actually is.  We live in a culture now where the fantasy world of fiction is being pulled desperately by many to our world, allowing the ignorant individual to camouflage him or herself from the actual reality of the world, the reality of the political and religious dogmatism of their country, the reality of their town or city they live in, the reality of their friends, the reality of their family and most importantly the reality of their own mind.  We live in the most distorted time for a group of people that should by all accounts be the most enlightened, given all the access we have to knowledge not only of the present but of the past.

What’s so interesting about The Force Awakens is it’s here in a time of actual global despair.  The first Star Wars film was released in 1977 during a time of despair. Both films are about the dark and the light, they are about awakening, they are about the future and saving it.  Sadly the lessons from the first films didn’t brush off as well as maybe they should have.  We are taking anonymity to the same level as we do when we play computer games.  What we destroy will reappear when we start over.  Through a McLuhan / Baudrillard Simulacra, we are hurting the world with real people in it, mistaking it for some form of delusional hyper-reality.

The question outside of the evolution of computers and postmodernism is, psychologically what are we doing when we do this, not to make light of real global issues?  We are compensating for a form of loneliness that we were born into, we are possessing our fantasies and forcing ourselves into their reality and out of our own actual reality, which is itself paradoxically its own fantasy.  

By doing this we are tethering ourselves to these fictional worlds, in this case Star Wars.  To use a fake spoiler as an example, the Terminator shows up in The Force Awakens, he is there to kill Rey because the First Order is worried about a new messianic-type leader to overthrow their plans.  This isn’t actually what happens in the film but if we wanted it to become part of the fantasy, the idea is to tell people before the film does, so that very knowledge would connect them with the film itself, via the soon-to-be memories that the moviegoer will experience.

The synergy surrounding Star Wars: The Force Awakens is monumental without a doubt, but our ability to keep these secrets to ourselves in our mass-surveilled society, with the temptation of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter’s ever flowing stream and the celebrity-driven desire for attention, in a First World plagued with over saturating posts and texts and likes and tweets and ‘how am I going to be seen in all of this glitter, how am I going to be something in this river of nonstop infotainment?’  This is what results in passive-aggressive tendencies of illuminating a sort of Bat signal on to the world of social media, for good or for bad.

Sadly the film will try to teach us a lesson that most of us will not hear through the distracted techno-linguistic vernacular of our minds.  The lesson is to be in the world, to not always dream of what we want but to actualize it.  Rey chooses to ‘be’ in the world, she decides to fight, not electronically via the safety of her place, but to get outside of her head and be in the world, where other people are.

Star Wars is a fantasy, it’s a place that we are suppose to drift away to and forget about our daily problems.  The problem here is that George Lucas never intended this franchise to be just that.  He created a philosophy, not as idealistic as Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek but one more grounded in reality, in a way Joseph Campbell would appreciate.  Star Wars isn’t about action, it’s about thinking.  The force is thought itself, sure in the films a Jedi could move objects with his mind.  The Dark Side allowed forcing strangulation, but the point here is, and what most of us should take from The Force Awakens and the originals is that (thought) + (action) results in something like Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity or (thought) + (action) may result in Hitler’s own holocaust.

George Lucas was aware of these forces in the world and likely within himself.  He would have glimpsed at his Jungian Shadow every now and then like the most of us.  The Force Awakens continues with this metaphorical battle of the minds within our very own mind.  It entertains its audience while allowing them to subtly confront their own battle, as Plato put it, while recognizing that they aren’t the only ones fighting it.  

       

Krampus and the Dark Reality of Christmas

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON DECEMBER. 07, 2015

A Christmas warning, please don’t unwrap this wretched gift until you’ve seen the movie first.  Spoilers under the tree.

Krampus was fun in spite of all the cardboard cut-out uses of some of its stereotypical supporting characters, such as the fat kid or the angst-ridden teenage girl, who are among a dysfunctional family that are at the core of this twisted holiday tale.  Krampus was also horrifyingly disturbing as its main ghoulish demon character arrives, or is rather accidentally summoned, to teach this, and every other family in their neighborhood the consequences of not celebrating the true spirit of Christmas.

The ludicrously psychotic romp of a Christmas-themed movie centers around a disillusioned young boy named Max who gives up his festive spirit of Christmas.  This unleashes the wrath of Krampus who, along with his Gremlin-esque band of ghouls and goblins, lay waste to all the dispirited family members.  Max’s mother, father and sister along with their idiotic, gun-toting uncle and his aunt and their depressingly moronic, zombie-like children.  Also Max’s mother’s drunken hardnosed aunt and his quiet German grandmother who is holding a secret about this ancient evil who comes to punish all the non-believers.

The historical origin of Krampus, a hairy chain carrying creature with cloven hooves and horns of a goat, is not known but is believed to have come from pre-Christian times.  This anthropomorphized creature is said to have come from Germanic paganism and was later assimilated into Christian folklore becoming a sort of devil.  Saint Nicholas become widely known in the eleventh century in Germany where he and his elves would reward children with gifts if they were good all year.  Conversely, as all these religious traditions need their binary opposites, Krampus became the threat to all the misbehaved children that would be punished for being bad.

There is something incredibly morbid about the existence of this factious incarnation of the devil.  To be called a ‘good person’ is to say that one is living within the outlined parameters of what’s expected of them based on any given societies rule book.  To be ‘bad’ is to step outside of those parameters, which is to say any form of growth that doesn’t correlate with family and cultural tradition is deemed bad and as a consequence is punished.

The problem here is this isn’t always a bad idea.  Civilization as a human project was founded on making rules for people to follow in order to maintain a level of command.  Here is where the crossroads can cause a problem because some people aspire to grow, to think outside the box that their parents, their teachers, their employers, their religious leaders and their governments have built so tightly around them to keep them controlled.

This movie is about control and beliefs because we are manufactured by powerful men and thus communicated through a form of mythology, where naïve humans need such beliefs to allow themselves to surreptitiously be confused by the beneficiaries of the very creators, who made all this up in the first place.  Krampus explores this absurdity throughout as seemingly innocent people are being ripped to pieces because they lost the meaning to a holiday that was artificial in the first place, to get to as much money from them as possible.

Christmas is a holiday packaged as this joyful time, yet many people maintain a high level of stress throughout.  These neurotic people wish to be seen as followers, they want friends and family to experience the best time for reasons they probably will never know themselves.  We are all playing along while corporations are fucking cleaning up.  We have to participate because if we don’t we are ‘misbehaving’, we are ‘bad’, we are not following the flow which itself is leading us all to bankruptcy.  Do the corporations, the banks, the governments that hover over us all care?  No, because they are amoral, they are indifferent to our emotional plight.  They want the money to feed their stockholders, that’s it.  Christmas has become a product and we are all part of the packaging, we have been scammed because the house already won.  

Merry Christmas!!!

In the opening moments Krampus shows us who we are with a big fat mirror.  It shows that we are a lost and drifting society, desperately searching for meaning that we no longer have the rights to.  Corporations now own the rights to our very lives, they along with their religious institutions and government sponsors control our every purchase, our every social media update and now sadly our every thought because now we all only think in test messaging and facebook and twitter updates, assigning our very being to these corporate techno-farming camps.  

Krampus ended with this boy Max along with his family, who were all murdered by the Krampus itself or its goblins, to exist in the happiness of Christmas morning but yet trapped in the bubble of a snow globe.  The meaning here is that we can’t handle the so-called darkness of reality itself.  The Krampus within the film and its Alpine folklore ended being an unreality adjuster, where its purpose is to keep the people in the dream state and not thinking about the realities of the very world they exist in.  This movie is about how fucked up we all are as we wake up and go to work for whoever only to go home and fall asleep, only to wake up and do it all over again.  It’s about being good in the eyes of what’s expected and if you fail at this task you are excommunicated, removed from possibly influencing others to think for themselves. 

Straight Outta Compton: N.W.A and the Authority Against the Unauthorized

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON AUGUST. 18, 2015

Fuck tha police

Comin straight from the underground

Young nigga got it bad cuz I’m brown

And not the other color so police think

They have the authority to kill a minority

Fuck that shit, cuz I ain’t tha one

For a punk muthafucka with a badge and a gun

To be beatin on, and throwin in jail

We could go toe to toe in the middle of a cell

Fuckin with me cuz I’m a teenager

With a little bit of gold and a pager

Searchin my car, lookin for the product

Thinkin every nigga is sellin narcotics.

‘Fuck Tha Police’ - Ice Cube, N.W.A

Straight Outta Compton was an exciting biopic about an American gangsta rap, West Coast hip hop group called N.W.A (Niggaz Wit Attitudes) and their rise to fame while surviving the police in Compton, California.  The group was founded by Eazy-E and along with the DJ talents of Dr. Dre, N.W.A was born in 1986.  Soon Ice Cube, DJ Yella and MC Ren would join the group and they would release their debut album Straight Outta Compton in 1988.

Compton, California, certainly at the time when N.W.A came to be, was a crime ridden city in southern Los Angeles County. Black and Hispanic Gangs like the Bloods and the Cribs ruled over the various neighborhoods as the Los Angeles Police Department, often without cause, would randomly and violently harass and arrest young black men.  To be far, the rule of law in these neighborhoods was out of control.  Drugs and various other crimes were committed by many of Compton’s residents.   

The problem here, which Straight Outta Compton dealt brilliantly with was the racial profiling side of the violence of Compton.  The LAPD seemed so out matched that their officers patrolling the streets of Compton became cynical and ultimately apathetic to the city’s residents.  Many young black men, who were not committing any crimes were often treated like criminals by the police.  This, quite understandably, divided the people of Compton from the very police assigned to their city to protect them from actual criminals.

The hypocrisy of this dynamic was often present in this revealing film.  These urban youth felt that they needed to survive the gang ridden criminality and the police on a daily basis while trying to go to school or even walk down the street on their way to the store.  The attitudes that subsequently had to develop were tough and that could appear to the police as ‘gangsta’ when all these youths were trying to do was what was needed to survive and live another day.

There was a scene early in the film when a school bus was pulled over by a couple of gang members because teenagers in the bus were yelling out the window at them.  Ice Cube was writing song lyrics when one of these gang members pulled a gun and threatened them all, advising them to not fuck with him.  This was daily life in Compton which N.W.A would later try to reveal to the world. 

Most people in the first world, along with this very writer, have really no idea what it must have been like to live in a place where the ‘good-guys’ and the ‘bad-guys’ both existed in gray areas, and where were both equal threats.  One’s ability to trust other people would be in turmoil.  No wonder the youth would stick to tight groups and fight for each other to the death if need be.  ‘War-zone’ might be an exaggeration but to a young person with no other environment to compare it to, this could easily feel like soldiers in the trenches being abandon by the very people they were brought up to believe would be there for them. 

Straight Outta Compton was about a group of talented young black men that expressed themselves, through embellished lyrics and heavy bass-driven thumps, conveying their desire not only to survive the trenches of their neighborhoods but also the nationally little known hypocrisy that made up their daily lives.

There’s also this Stockholm Syndrome of Compton that is present in this film where these young men love where they’re from.  Their identity is balled up in what they hate and what they love about where they’re from.  They want Compton on the map, for it to be known to the world but yet are consumed by its oppression, its instability, its racism, and its violence.  Psychologically this must be forever damaging.  These young men and women were brought up in a place where shots were fired hourly and where their protectors hate them for reasons neither side understand, but its home.

Home is a funny place because in spite of its bad memories, its decay, it’s still home, which is all we know, until we leave, if we do, and discover possibly better parts of the world.  For most people though, home is still home, no matter what bad memories existed there.  Home is where a person first connects to the tribe and that connection is often a lifelong one for most.

N.W.A expressed their love and their hate for their home in every song they jackhammer their audience with.  We shouldn’t forget though that most of these boys were teenagers, singing about these violent but ultimately expressive ideas.  Most of us were barely dealing with pimples and girls let alone dealing with the idea of being actually shot at for whatever reason.

“FUCK THA POLICE” I’m taking your black ass to jail.

N.W.A had a problem with the police and ultimately authority which in the street, the police represented.  As much as we want to apply the ‘law’ to the reasons as to why the police justified themselves, it’s hard to think about liberalism and freedom of expression and find a problem with what these artists were explicitly expressing themselves.

That said, these young men were not without their faults.  They carried guns and threated the lives of other people, they stood up to people and were willing to kill but yet didn’t.  Some of these boys went to jail and some didn’t but the ‘hood’ either way was breed in them all.  They made a record that expressed their ground, their plight, their war, which was received well in the community and across the nation but not by everyone.  Some decided to steamroll over many of their albums.

Straight Outta Compton showed these boys gained fame but also dealt with White America and the problem with the reality of their lyrics.  In Detroit they got arrested because they were ordered to not sing ‘Fuck Tha Police’ but they did anyway.  The FBI investigated them because of their decent.  This band was not popular among many groups, religious and minority, across the country.

What was really being rebelled against here?  White America, as they believe today, oppressed black people for reasons, without logic, that most people in the states still can’t explain for fear of sounding publically racist.  Black people are not equal, the problem is sadly our culture still perpetuates this.  Why?

Why?

There isn’t anything biologically that qualifies this line of thinking, so what is it?  Tradition.  Our ancestors believed in something ludicrous, just as they did with religion, and many to this day, stupid people, follow this line of non-thinking.  We do what our dad did and avoid going beyond him, mind and spirit.  Racist, simplistic thought are what the world has in common and what it needs to get rid of (ideally).

Straight Outta Compton dealt with the Rodney King beating and trial, which resulted in an acquittal for the police officers involved in the beating.   The LA riots occurred as these young men from Compton revaluated their own reality.  The question here is; what are they doing?  Are they causing problems in society or are they waking it up, and are these two questions mutually elusive?

With Ferguson and many other examples of police brutality against black people, to this very day unfortunately, conveys a reality that N.W.A rapped about over two decades ago.  White America still can’t equally accept black people into the American Dream.  The reality is; is black people are seen as black people and not people.  As much as this writer wished that this wasn’t the case, all one has to do is watch the news.  Objectively black people are simply people with dark skin, which we all started from back in Kenya before global migration happened.

Police brutality has become this license to beat down minorities and ultimately fuel the very cause as to why certain minority groups are not allowed to participate in the white man’s version of the happiness.  Straight Outta Compton represents these very minorities that artistically fought through the white man’s dream to stamp their claim to freedom.

N.W.A ended up going their separate ways after Ice Cube moved on and went solo. Eazy-E stuck with Dre for a bit before Dre went off and created Death Row. Eazy-E got sick and was diagnosed with AIDS, he died in 1995.

In the end, the film was about expression in the face of incredible odds.  Tupac, Eminem, 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg and many others, where not only influenced by N.W.A but were financed and produced by Dr. Dre himself.