Dystopian Parables for the Masses: DIVERGENT, CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER

Jump, baby, Jump! Jump into the Uncanny Valley, wherein chicks and hunks in black and silver body suits are slicked over with CGI-bearing golden-brownish glow air brush make-up as they fight the onrush of mechanical dystopia of enforced digital sameness until the snake eats itself, the valley fills, and the need for actors disappears altogether. And then, when mom starts singing "Clash City Rockers" because it turns up on a car commercial, then, and only then, I'll know it's too late even for me.

I'm old enough, even too old, to accept this brutal truth but the kids today don't have any other option, their cliques are too stratified. "Clash City Rockers" is 'their parent's music' and hence off limits. But punk rock was a big tent in the 1980s; we didn't have to decide if we were Goth or Emo or Strait Edge or hardcore or Edward or Jacob or Erudite or Dauntless or closeted or 'out' or bisexual, we were all just punks or (more likely) poseurs, smoking ourselves dizzy at City Gardens waiting for The Ramones or Iggy Pop to start. But today you need to pick your clique and must abide by its rules or risk a fate worse than death--exile, the agony of another Saturday night spent alone in your room reading comic books, manga, until you snap and start making yourself up like you're a Japanese drawing.


In both the recently released to DVD 2014 films, DIVERGENT and CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER, there's a dude who has to fight fascist brainwashing, who's ordered to kill the one he loves, and the one he loves doesn't give up on him, even risking their lives because, damn it, you don't give up on your old army buddy or a cute guy who respects your virgin boundaries. Each brainwashed buddy is programmed to kill all those who pose a threat to a deranged Kate Winslet or brilliantly-against-type Robert Redford. But love is stronger than brainwashing, able to survive even lame 'sensitive' male Subaru voiceovers, deeper than behavioral programming can ever reach --but it's not until much acting as a lone member of the military has to question conformity and in the process becomes an enemy of those following orders like she or he was following them mere moments before, only after we've already seen just how formidable those order-followers are. Taken together these two films paint a nice portrait of where we are today as an eternally teenage wasteland nation, and how it's our own addictive craving for home security that puts us in danger, how it's our obsession with health that makes us sick, our longing for security blankets that puts us in the danger we need security blankets to avoid.

yeah, all that glowing stuff is going to have to be removed

But if grooving with a nine figure-budgeted movie spinning in your hardware can make you feel that you're part of a vox populi juggernaut revolution, even if only for two hours and ten minutes, facing danger unafraid, just by watching, dissolving into the breathless pace and riveting action... then just remember that while you were so motionless on the couch, six more species died in the rain forest.... and you could have prevented it, for just fifty cents a day, that's less than the price of a cup of coffee. Would you like to know more?

Keep your logos round and burning

Conversely, here's a little-advertised truth about addiction I've learned the 'hard' way: drug and alcohol withdrawal is brutally painful, terrifying, even soul-crushing, BUT it can bring sexual pleasure as exponentially intense as the pain, exhilaration as intense as the terror, and enduring the intensity of withdrawal from the media's cozy hypnosis brings true liberation-- but first you must truly suffer, convulsing, screaming, vomiting and rolling around on the cool tiles. Stretching your limits is just another word for the rack.

And no one suffers on the rack like a teenager, whose growth is involuntary, fought against, a werewolf transformation that takes agonizing years instead of a few dissolves or Rick Baker mechanics. The one part missing from the TWILIGHT movies: the book talked of the great flaming agony stretching on for timeless weeks that Bela endures in her transition from dying anorexic pregnant teen to hip, naturally-toned rich mom vampire. When you don't endure the trauma, the basic training breakdown, the post-marathon soreness, or the primordial terror of the final few bardos of death or deep meditation, then your transformation, your evolution, is not permanent. This is why there are so few 'real' men in this country, because unless they've been in a war or lost a limb or otherwise faced great hardship for long enough, and it's this need for trauma, coupled to the fear of it (inseparable from the fear of dying) that makes a good dystopian parable for the masses.


And one final proverb: it is the duty of any nonconformist or outcast in a conformist society to subvert that society, and that subversion usually creates big suffering-i.e. Jesus on the cross, Mandela in the jail, and Gandhi on the hunger strike; but if you want to avoid that pain, you can stay addicted to to the virtual pleasure of the simulacrum and just write a Young Adult dystopia novel or superhero comic or screenplay wherein your protagonist subverts an even more conformist future or alternate reality--and if it sells, conformity expands to envelop it, then shrinks back as it digests, and is spit out a decade later in a lame car insurance commercial. Truly it is written in expensive theory books forced on liberal arts undergrads the nation over: a reigning social power can find no surer way of survival than incorporating critiques of itself, ushering in an era wherein compliance as the 'reality' behind the gloss becomes the simulacrum. In HUNGER GAMES, Donald Sutherland's nervous uneducated military dictator thinks suppressing the symbols of rebellion will suppress the rebellion itself, but a media savvy ruler doesn't outlaw a symbol; he mass markets them; he flashes the Girl Scout / Revolution gang sign at press conferences. Anything--even Sid Vicious snarling "My Way" becomes trite and douche chilled once it's co-opted into a car commercial. No revolution can win against a government that burns itself in effigy every night on the evening news. What are you going to do to protest, put out the fire?

In order to be free from our addiction to the dystopias Hollywood regularly conjures and defeats, we must learn to love the pain deprivation brings, the kind one must suffer to achieve. No super expensive wine ever tasted half so sweet as a swig of warm canteen water to a dehydrated ocean castaway--is this not the the core truth of meditation, or stereograms or the rapturous freedom of the starving, tortured artist -- hallucinating sausages and flagons in his swirling oils? And nothing's more disillusioning than realizing your bleak outlook and spiritual crisis that cost you years of suffering and depression was solved with a single SSRI and by the same extension, that anyone with the right technology, drugs, or patience could turn you into their automaton with the flick of an artificially-implanted cerebellum switch.

Thus the brainwashed super-conductive Winter Soldier (above) doesn't flinch or protest when his keepers want to give him an electric shock memory wipe. He just leans back into the chair and opens to receive his rubber mouth guard like an angry boxer. The captain meanwhile is thrown into a dilemma when he doesn't quite know who to trust within the NSA-Homeland Security-ish conspiracy web knows as S.H.I.E.L.D, and I simply cannot give more away, but it's this 'question authority' theme that gives the film its emotional resonance; communist academes can say what they want, in Captain America's heyday (he was frozen in 1945, if you don't know, so he could miss becoming Reb Brown -left) we had a real enemy to fight, and the fear we might actually lose was a real fear that brought Americans together and cured the Depression in a heartbeat.

And in DIVERGENT the brainwash comes via a remotely activated chip air-injected into each 'Dauntless' member's neck as part of an alleged locator program, a process woven so seamlessly into all the other initiatory processes that no one can hardly complain--any more than a private in the army can complain if they're forced to do push-ups. The big fear for our plucky DIVERGENT heroine, Tris (Shairlene Woodley)--isn't being brainwashed, it's that her friends will find out she's not one of the approved types of persona which act as fascist-brand masonic brotherhoods that all young citizens of this society must fit into, because not doing so means being 'divergent' - i.e. cliqueless, and alone, daring to say no to peer pressure --and chip (brainwash) resistant. The type of person who, for example, never feels part of 'mob mentality' (1). In the big picking ceremony she goes for the daredevil mesomorph soldier brigade (i.e. the jocks or the Wermacht) the 'Dauntless' group, but she's way too independent and peaceful; yet she's too athletic and dopey to be an Erudite (the fretful nerds, or the SS); too Erudite to be Abnegation (the homeless shelter volunteers / Hitler Youth), etc. But this is a dystopia where your friends jump off a bridge and if you don't follow them you're banished from society; or have to succumb to paranoia to not be suspect; (if you're Erudite), or let yourself get exploited and scapegoated if you're Abnegation (i.e. Bunuel's VIRIDIANA), and so on. I appreciate the Platonic ideal at work here,  (see also STAR TREK) but while that makes for a government that can get the things done, it's really just going to devolve into a fascist dictatorship sooner or later. So why not start now? Hit 'em while their pants are down!



Sure it's a little trite, but I liked DIVERGENT mainly because of all the twisty high school clique-as-metaphor-for-fascism stuff involved, the way initiation rites are incorporated into the lure of the popular kids clique, institutionalized but just enough that both the personal and political seamlessly interweave, like joining the Riffs, the SEALS, the Heathers, getting your ears pierced, your first tattoo, your yearbook signed, and drinking your first beer and smoking your first cigarette all on the same day. Feeling like you finally belong somewhere --which is an intoxicating high especially if you've never felt it before--only to find out you're suddenly being shipped off to Vietnam, like Treat Williams at the end of HAIR.


The thing DIVERGENT doesn't get is that having a weak central girl throws off the curve- Kristen Stewart was Antigone strong; Jennifer Lawrence genuinely mythic in HUNGER GAMES; the kid in ENDER'S GAME spookily self-confident, but this chick Tris is perhaps--to her detriment--the most 'normal' teenager-like of the bunch; she's a terrible liar and though courageous lacks the inner fascist to succeed as a Dauntless. She doesn't have a war face, she's not Artemis-esque or Antigone-determined or a prodigy, and her puffy face dilates and registers every emotion, which is not good if you're gay, I mean "divergent" in a world hostile to difference. If you show your true face they will get you, the same ones who urge you to be yourself are the ones who will attack you if your self turns out different than theirs. The core of every teenage fear lies in this idea, that the joy found in belonging to a cool group will soon give way to the terror of being abandoned by them for revealing who you really are, or that the parent or god that watches over you is just a trickster demon awaiting the right time to remove its saintly mask to expose that which our whole life was a shield against seeing--his hideous giant demon face coming forward to consume you like one of Kafka's devouring industrial vaters--all the while encouraging us to take off our masks, to be ourselves, almost mockingly... 

Come on, Charlie Brown... kick the football. 


 In WINTER and DIVERGENT the moment of exposing the demon face behind the mask is when what was once just rumor and conspiracy theory starts to lock shut (SEMI-SPOILERS AHEAD), too late to resist it, no time to plan a defense, when what you didn't see coming comes not on the horizon ahead but behind, next to, within, and in all directions, making its move only when its sure all resistance has been pre-demonized as terrorism and disarmed, isolated, and surrounded. Then the NSA takes off its mask and the Sixth Reich Paperclip draconian totalitarian future-present is right there, and has been, in disguise all this time, and the Homeland Security emblem turns out to be a scrambled up swastika, and it's too late to do anything about it because we've signed all our freedoms away in the name of order, because we got all scared when the news waved some Muslims at us. God help us, we activated SKYNET. Get General Ripper was right! They've infiltrated our precious bodily fluids. 

Masks on / masks off

Now, I don't really believe in a massive global conspiracy per se, the world is far too chaotic, and because in Hollywood, as we all know, industry guys can do all the coke they want, but it's the Middle American teenager with a week's expendable income in his pocket on his or her first date who runs the industry, and always has--maybe he or she just read Plato in class or learned about World War Two and this proximity to horror and lure of fascism, the life inside the brutal crucible of high school, of cyber bullies and peer pressure and the rush of the first law break or sense of belonging all makes them unusually susceptible to fantasy and escape with a more dystopian life-or-death finality totally lacking in the John Hughes (and Arnold Schwarzenegger) 80s. And if you win the teenager's heart, they'll come back for the sequels, they'll buy the DVD, and in 20 years they'll buy it again in a deluxe commemorative edition, and it can run in perpetuity across a spectrum of cable channels.

The unconscious programming aspect, through, which helps Hollywood's dystopia machine hooks 'em, is the dark underbelly, the conditioning, the inference via the subject matter, the cathartic triumph of the individual over the collective-gone-astray, that our society doesn't need fixing, because if we lived in one of these dystopias then Hollywood wouldn't be allowed to spin these yarns on the dangers of conformity, these huge financial investment that requires tens of millions of ticket-buyers just to break even. The film itself is the proof we don't need to rebel -- the film gets us, me, you, personally, grants us the cathartic release of all our charged up anger at being so powerless to stop the giant mechanical maw that chews our world beyond repair just to feed, clothe, and shelter us all for one more lousy meal for one more lousy day.


And of course, there are the girls, the ladies, locked into the golden gloss that makes all them all now look like they're CGI avatars slick with softener, every frame of their face Maximed to abstraction, all the better inject them into the video game vein. But hey, the good news: boys have picked up some slack to become the human objects, which is like, so like, finally, you know? It's the baby steps, man. Before women can be free of objectification they must first choose a replacement, and there's but one traditional gender left. There is a season, turn turn, but don't say I didn't warn you about that Uncanny Valley crossing, ladies. This is John Connor coming to you from inside Crystal Peak: let the revolution commence broadcasting on UHF, on the Emergency Broadcast System, on the HAM radio, anywhere it can be safe from the digital detection. Analog only. Talk in pictures not in words, and be careful where you tread / that's the wire- / ... click


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