Media consumption is a signifier of power, often the things we watch signal our intellectual refinement, political ideals, and our sophistication within the perceived status of the media being consumed. It's a subliminal caste system that separates the plebs from the connoisseur, the neckbeards from the aged oak barrel scotch sampling elites. Often these divisions have nothing to do with the actual economic status in itself, in essence, the media we watch and enjoy become vehicles for cultural consumerism and secondary tertiary social hierarchies aiding the ones entrenched by identity and monetary status. This cultural capital pays its dividends too, as it often helps in masking one's financial status and being a chameleon sailing in a sea of wealth. Cultural capital also acts as a signifier of privilege and pedigree, giving the possessor of the cultural capital greater access to the centers of power.

This differentiation can be seen in the classification of films into categories such as “low-brow” movies or “art-house” pictures, with each painting a stereotypical idea of the patron who consumes this media. Also, the conventional snobbishness over movies can be seen in how they are referenced: a movie is different from a film different from a picture is different from a flick, though the stickiness of the end product is almost always the same. We forget the movies we watched the moment we're out of the movie theatres, so any positive messaging in movies is lost after a day before our monkey minds latch onto the next piece of media to lose themselves into. This is of course factoring in the serious movie-goers who switch off their phones when in the theaters while discounting at home, doom scrolling while watching some faff, or watching a movie on the phone types. Though this kind of passive viewing is attached to the hypnotic states movies can offer us, a kind of meditation in-and-for capitalism, where burned-out workers soothe their ailing and lonely minds with familiar comforts of human presence.

What we consume also makes us who we are in subliminal ways, our associations and visions of ourselves are inspired by the dreams and visions we imbibe. Movies give us a way to imagine different power possibilities, after all the core tenet of dramatic writing is the hero's journey, oftentimes the hero's ascension to power. This channels our fluid perceptions of ourselves, giving us a worldview to filter and navigate. Each piece of media we consume becomes the foothold for the next, creating a cascade of interdependent interests which in turn become the narrowed field of vision through which we imagine the story of our lives. In a hypothetical space, all streams of consciousness have the same power but in a practical world with entrenched power structures where we know that certain consciousnesses are more powerful than the rest, this lends to media itself. What you see is who you are.

#media #power #philosophy

A free trip to Antarctica and insanity

What does mean to be alive and what does it mean to be human? This is the focus of great art, as these are the questions that keep one awake at night. Living in “regular” human civilization means robbing oneself of the joy of living in an untamed universe. We live in our mole hills and rat caves distracted by the voice of other occupants of these hills and caves. Why do we humans have the necessity to control over inferior animals, what does it reveal about our nature? Werner Herzog's documentary Encounters at the End of the World asks a series of existential questions camouflaged within a nature documentary set in Antarctica, taking philosophical twists and turns in a breathtaking, alien landscape and bizarre characters. Werner Herzog himself is the main protagonist in the move, the camera follows his view and the people he selects for the film are the ones that are able to dance with his intellect. If Encounters.. was a fiction film, it would be a great adventure drama, the story of a Hero on a journey to seek answers to solve problems of his back home. Here home is the Planet Earth and the life it in encompasses, the vastness of the subject gives the canvas for Herzog's questions and the fact that such vastness can be imagined becomes microscope under which he questions intelligence itself. Here we are thinking about taxes and pay raises, figuring out work schedules and planning for retirements while juggling with news transmissions about war, strife, pandemics and poverty while on the edge of the world, a group of scientists ponder over the origins of the universe and life while making grim predictions about the long term viability of human civilization on the planet.

The movie, conceptualized on the spot follows the script of Slacker and Waking Life in terms of inquiry, while the setting of Antarctica lends itself a special character of its own. The main hero beyond what we see however, is the landscape itself, a part of this planet that we now commandeer, it's the last frontier of that's spared from the human rituals of occupations and settlement (though in retrospect, the scientific community might be the first settlers of the Antarctica, climate change might make the continent our future destination of cozy beach holidays). A day after watching the movie I had a mini-breakdown, with its content stimulating an aching existential crisis, the result of which I paraphrased here.

Rather be a mute, inanimate spectator to the universe than being born in this world, there is nothing wonderful about being human – there's the aspect of being dazzled by the dizzying beauty of the universe and the world we live in but the human constructs like all animal constructs are boring. They have the same structures of pleasure and power, this constant battle for survival in forms both physical and mental. Better being a miscarriage than being misguided by the brief moment of consciousness that robs all the wonder of living. There's no difference between me living and a bacterial predator hanging in the deep seas, in the soup of evolution the mind has peaked and someday this will perish too.. me along with the whole of humanity. Existence as defined by the possessions one owns, born deep into a system one cannot escape, one that promotes misery and loneliness.. there's no love, I have transcended these feelings of being and belonging.. intelligence has taken me and others to the depths of self pleasure and validation that fazes all wonderment. Better be a stone in the sun, reconverted into primary elements than be subjected to the horrors of consciousness, it is no pleasure to be alive, being full of life is escapism from what we are. Intelligence is about discovery, of understanding what is and defining it in depth, narrow foci of science and mathematics, between flashes of eating and living. Possessions are a way of establishing one's presence in life, in reality we have no home, only theories of make-believe.

Encounters.. should come with a warning of having the ability to stir a great deal of existential angst, whether it be from the sounds of the seals under the Antarctic ice shelf or through the penguins wandering from their colony into the icy nothings in the interiors of the desert or the scientist who has studied the penguins for so long that he no longer prefers having conversations with people. Filled to the brim with interesting facets of science of the Antarctic life, the movie serves as a time machine to imagine a world without people and the primordial origins of life on Earth. It's an experience that will leave one speechless for a long time and be the potential fodder for innumerable debates.

The sounds of the seals and the gaze of the suicidal penguins will haunt your dreams, don't tell me that I didn't warn you.

#documentary #philosophy #Herzog

or the lost art of watching cinema

I recently watched a two hour movie over a period of a week, decimating it to the point of watching single frames at any given moment. It didn't help that the movie was not interesting, but still I took it upon myself as a challenge. Such a viewing misery would have been unfathomable a few years ago, when I trained myself to watch four movies a day without losing steam. I find this similar to my book reading habit that fell off the cliff with the advent of the internet and I do not find these behaviours to be an anomaly but a sign of things to come.

We have forgotten how to watch movies. We have forgotten the very act of seeing. It has been normalized now that we always have a screen where we can see something, all the time. This continual engagement demands that we are not bored at any given instant. Along with this came the idea of constant choice where we can customise what we want to watch and when. Scroll through a video to get where we want – the action bits, the money shots and the tugs of aggression and emotion. Social media became more interactive, delivering dramatic sequences that have been keeping us engaged for more than a decade now.

Watching a movie now is a matter of singular occupation for two hours. We are not watching one movie, our choice always has another on backup. The economic cost of streaming the next movie on Netflix, YouTube or your favourite pirate viewing site is next to nothing – unlike watching a movie in a kino, where there's a high entry cost and we are left with only one perspective of choice made by faceless humans. This leaves us with the question, is a trip to the kino worth the 8 euros I am paying for a movie?

With endless choice also comes the problem of endless selection. Gone are the days of a singular recommendation or a collective euphoria over a show. Content has become disposable and goes stale faster than your average news cycle. Netflix's early proposition of endless choice came with its own pitfall – the moment it stops offering its consumers the choice, they will leave the platform. This spin of choice has to be constant or even overwhelming to lull a customer into a state of constant monthly spending. This is in contrast with earlier iterations of film viewing where one had to go to the kino or buy physical copies of films or even pirate them online, which gave access to content one piece at a time. This attached more value for a movie, which results in a more concentrated approached to the act of viewing.

”(1925?) The TALKIE opens its doors to theatre which occupies the place and surrounds it with barbed wire.” – Robert Bresson

I am not complaining that cinema is in some kind of post-capitalistic fugue, it has always been the balm of the industrial masses and it is here to stay. This does not mean that the current form it assumes is immune to criticism, it serves the same function as stress shopping or yoga does after a long day's work. It makes one forget about the immediate reality and gives the right amount of dopamine ping to work for another day and then another. In this respect cinema loses its status as an art-form and becomes a crutch to escape from everyday reality. This crutch is formless and shapeless, except that it has to have a moving image that ticks the right boxes. An extreme form of this manifestation can be seen the status end-titles are given on Netflix: they are an afterthought in the production mill of content. The hundreds of faceless people are stripped off responsibility for the convenience of speed. The byproduct is that most movies on streaming platforms come and go without having any effect on us whatsoever. The yesteryear cinematic spectacle is now transformed into an endless looped GIF to be shared on a social media site of your preference.

This is not saying that cinema is in danger. It is – the pandemic disrupted our very act of collective gathering before an image on the screen. Content is now hyper-individualized, once we get a taste of this it is hard to go back. But I see hopeful signs as kinos around the world open up and new releases slowly make inroads into our colloquial language. The days of the art-house cinephile might be coming to an end as the theatres can only host big-budgeted Hollywood crowd pullers to sustain their revenues. Though I hope a self correcting mechanism will rise organically which helps bring the art of watching back into vogue. Distanced from capital, cinema is one of the truly collective meditative experiences that creates a sense of community without demanding anything in return. Or maybe dream will never manifest and Tik-Tok becomes the fractured reality model we want to consume. Cinema becomes the bastion of a few, sinking in a sea of choice.

#film #philosophy

A film by Aki Kaurismäki

Pay for the flat two months in advance, cash. File all notebooks and books, seal and pack them. Put them in the street corner where the free clothes and old books overflow from an ageing hippie's window. Be unseen, make no friends. Have a tape for company, singing John Yager's “Benson, Arizona”.

Benson, Arizona, blew warm wind through your hair My body flies the galaxy, my heart longs to be there Benson, Arizona, the same stars in the sky But they seemed so much kinder when we watched them, you and I

Remember the idea you once heard on the U-bahn? The idea that the easiest way to die is to drink two bottles of high grain Finnish vodka and sleep naked on a cold street? The alcohol will easen the hypothermia and one dies in the hotness of the cold. Have no papers what so ever, they are shattered and scattered all across small rest stops in Sweden and Norway. Cancel all accounts, stuff all your pockets with small change and feel rich. So much paper, maybe give some homeless guy a 100€ and a bottle of champagne. Talk to him (or her), ask how he moves. Friends receive post-dated letters, cryptic enough to validate a disappearance but not distant to accommodate the fear of death. Burn all certificates, flush them down the toilet. They are a chain – a tether to concepts sold to you, and us. Ridding of all official documentation is the destruction of the social self, home is nothing but an illusion. There never was a home outside of us, just a constant search for one. The tape recorder creaks the same song on loop.

Buy tickets with your spare cash. Be kind to the clerk, be kind to anyone you meet. Give them a genuine human interaction, that is to say don't be an ant. No fake hellos and goodbyes. Drink with merry in bars with bad music and worse patrons, let the beer overflow in preparation for the vodka singes. Bathe in cold water, soak but don't dry. Every experience is in preparation for the final one – know that you are time and time projects the whole universe in you, 13.6 billion years if the current view is to believed. A name is the first employ of funneling personality. Name yourself anything else, Fish is a good suggestion. Dry on the Nordic shores, salted through frozen waves. There's the mermaid Ice Queen sitting somewhere in a costume. Go out to find her, in places where the language is the final diffusion of silence into emotion. A long dinner table covered in red tablecloth, plastic flowers wilting. Cook your chicken in the embers of your accumulated love. One final dusk, reds, dark violets and pluming clouds. Fall in love at every opportune moment. The cadaver if eaten by a wolf will bear the little symbolism of your existence. If there is luck the body will not be incinerated in some drab Norwegian morgue. Make paperwork easy, talk to the Syrian refugees. Dip yours fingers in sulfuric acid just when the drowsiness from the vodka is electrifying your nerves. You will pass out in the cold, dark night of the winter.

Why are you on this journey? Physical desires can be within reach but what about when searching for something that is not there? Where to reach out to if there is only stale air from previous attempts? Questions ask questions in infinity. There is peace in the silence of the mind. A nameless alcoholic that has be duly disposed off. This is the end of an animate story. Do not be afraid, shut your door behind you with no afterthought. Remember, there is no light in the polar shadows.

The tape recorder creaks with the stuck cassette:

Now the seasons flick on by
like seconds on this ship.
An' I take another pull
from the flask that's at my hip. The mighta-beens and the never-weres can drive a man insane. So-I think I'll stay out in the Void 'cause Benson's not the same.

#film #philosophy