Global Cinema

Global Cinematopic 1 – Images and metaphors of the global

Arjun Appadurai, "Modernity at large. Cultural dimensions of globalization"

Electronic media decisively change the wider field of mass media and other traditional media because they offer new resources and new disciplines for the construction of imagined selves and imagined worlds. Through such effects as the telescoping of news into audio-video bytes, through the tension between the public spaces of cinema and the more exclusive spaces of video watching, through the immediacy of their absorption into public discourse, and through their tendency to be associated with glamour, cosmopolitanism, and the new, electronic media (whether associated with the news, politics, family life, or spectacular entertainment) tend to interrogate, subvert, and transform other contextual literacies.

Always carrying the sense of distance between viewer and event, the electronic media nevertheless compel the transformation of everyday discourse. At the same time, they are resources for experiments with self-making in all sorts of societies, for all sorts of persons. They allow scripts for possible lives to be imbricated with the glamour of film stars and fantastic film plots and yet also to be tied to the plausibility of news shows, documentaries, and other black-and-white forms of telemediation and printed text. Because of the sheer multiplicity of the forms in which they appear (cinema, television, computers, and telephones) and because of the rapid way in which they move through daily life routines, electronic media provide resources for self-imagining as an everyday social project.

When the story of mass migrations (voluntary and forced) is juxtaposed with the rapid flow of mass-mediated images, scripts, and sensations, we have a new order of instability in the production of modern subjectivities. When moving images meet deterritorialized viewers, these create diasporic public spheres, phenomena that confound theories that depend on the continued salience of the nation-state as the key arbiter of important social changes.

Electronic mediation and mass migration create specific irregularities because both viewers and images are in simultaneous circulation. Neither images nor viewers fit into circuits or audiences that are easily bound within local, national, or regional spaces. Of course, many viewers may not themselves migrate. And many mass-mediated events are highly local in scope, as with cable television in some parts of the United States. But few important films, news broadcasts, or television spectacles are entirely unaffected by other media events that come from further afield. Both persons and images often meet unpredictably, outside the certainties of home and the cordon sanitaire of local and national media effects.

This mobile and unforeseeable relationship between mass-mediated events and migratory audiences defines the core of the link between globalization and the modern. The work of the imagination viewed in this context is a space of contestation in which individuals and groups seek to annex the global into their own practices of the modern.

There has been a shift in recent decades, building on technological changes over the past century or so, in which the imagination has become a collective, social fact. This development, in turn, is the basis of the plurality of imagined worlds.

In suggesting that the imagination in the postelectronic world plays a newly significant role, I rest my case on three distinctions. First, the imagination has broken out of the special expressive space of art, myth, and ritual and has now become a part of the quotidian mental work of ordinary life from which it had largely been successfully sequestered. Of course, this has precedents in the great revolutions, cargo cults, and messianic movements of other times, in which forceful leaders implanted their visions into social life, thus creating powerful movements for social change. Now, however, it is no longer a matter of specially endowed (charismatic) individuals, injecting the imagination where it does not belong. Ordinary people have begun to deploy their imaginations in the practice of their everyday lives.

More people than ever before seem to imagine routinely the possibility that they or their children will live and work in places other than where they were born: this is the wellspring of the increased rates of migration at every level of social, national, and global life. Others are dragged into new settings, as the refugee camps of Thailand, Ethiopia, Tamil Nadu, and Palestine remind us. For these people, they move and must drag their imagination for new ways of living along with them. And then there are those who move in search of work, wealth, and opportunity often because their current circumstances are intolerable. We may speak of diasporas of hope, diasporas of terror, and diasporas of despair. But in every case, these diasporas bring the force of imagination, as both memory and desire, into the lives of many ordinary people, into mythographies different from the disciplines of myth and ritual of the classic sort. The key difference here is that these new mythographies are charters for new social projects, and not just a counterpoint to the certainties of daily life. They move the glacial force of the habitus into the quickened beat of improvisation for large groups of people.

Here the images, scripts, models, and narratives that come through mass mediation (in its realistic and fictional modes) make the difference between migration today and in the past. Those who wish to move, those who have moved, those who wish to return, and those who choose to stay rarely formulate their plans outside the sphere of radio and television, cassettes and videos, newsprint and telephone. For migrants, both the politics of adaptation to new environments and the stimulus to move or return are deeply affected by a mass-mediated imaginary that frequently transcends national space.

The second distinction is between imagination and fantasy. There is a large and respectable body of writing, notably by the critics of mass culture of the Frankfurt School and anticipated in the work of Max Weber, that views the modern world as growing into an iron cage and predicts that the imagination will be stunted by forces of commoditization, industrial capitalism, and the generalized regimentation and secularization of the world. The modernization theorists of the past three decades largely accepted the view of the modern world as a space of shrinking religiosity, less play, and inhibited spontaneity at every level. The error works on two levels. First, it is based on a premature requiem for the death of religion and the victory of science.

There is vast evidence in new religiosities of every sort that religion is not only not dead but that it may be more consequential than ever in today’s highly mobile and interconnected global politics. On another level, it is wrong to assume that the electronic media are the opium of the masses. This view, which is only beginning to be corrected, is based on the notion that the mechanical arts of reproduction largely reprimed ordinary people for industrial work. It is far too simple.

There is growing evidence that the consumption of the mass media throughout the world often provokes resistance, irony, selectivity, and, in general, agency. Terrorists modeling themselves on Rambo-like figures (who have themselves generated a host of non-Western counterparts); housewives reading romances and soap operas as part of their efforts to construct their own lives; Muslim family gatherings listening to speeches by Islamic leaders on cassette tapes; domestic servants in South India taking packaged tours to Kashmir: these are all examples of the active way in which media are appropriated by people throughout the world. T-shirts, billboards, and graffiti as well as rap music, street dancing, and slum housing all show that the images of the media are quickly moved into local repertoires of irony, anger, humor, and resistance.

This is not to suggest that consumers are free agents, living happily in a world of safe malls, free lunches, and quick fixes. Consumption in the contemporary world is often a form of drudgery, part of the capitalist civilizing process. Nevertheless, where there is consumption there is pleasure, and where there is pleasure there is agency. Freedom, on the other hand, is a rather more elusive commodity.

Further, the idea of fantasy carries with it the inescapable connotation of thought divorced from projects and actions, and it also has a private, even individualistic sound about it. The imagination, on the other hand, has a projective sense about it, the sense of being a prelude to some sort of expression, whether aesthetic or otherwise. Fantasy can dissipate, but the imagination, especially when collective, can become the fuel for action. It is the imagination, in its collective forms, that creates ideas of neighborhood and nationhood, of moral economies and unjust rule, of higher wages and foreign labor prospects. The imagination is today a staging ground for action, and not only for escape.

The third distinction is between the individual and collective senses of the imagination. It is important to stress here that I am speaking of the imagination now as a property of collectives, and not merely as a faculty of the gifted individual. Part of what the mass media make possible, because of the conditions of collective reading, criticism, and pleasure, is what I have elsewhere called a “community of sentiment”, a group that begins to imagine and feel things together. Print capitalism can be one important way in which groups who have never been in face-to-face contact can begin to think of themselves as Indonesian or Indian or Malaysian. But other forms of electronic capitalism can have similar, and even more powerful effects, for they do not work only at the level of the nation-state. Collective experiences of the mass media, especially film and video, can create sodalities of worship and charisma, such as those that formed regionally around the Indian female deity Santoshi Ma in the seventies and eighties and transnationally around Ayatollah Khomeini in roughly the same period.

These sodalities resemble what Diana Crane (1972) has called “invisible colleges” in reference to the world of science, but they are more volatile, less professionalized, less subject to collectively shared criteria of pleasure, taste, or mutual relevance. They are communities in themselves but always potentially communities for themselves capable, of moving from shared imagination to collective action. Most important, these sodalities are often transnational, even postnational, and they frequently operate beyond the boundaries of the nation. These mass-mediated sodalities have the additional complexity that, in them, diverse local experiences of taste, pleasure, and politics can crisscross with one another, thus creating the possibility of convergences in translocal social action that would otherwise be hard to imagine.

The theory of rupture

• Electronic media and mass migration are interconnected factors.
• Their combined effect on the work of imagination is a key feature of modern subjectivity.
• Electronic media offer new resources for the construction of imagined selves and imagined worlds (scripts for possible lives).
• Mass migration creates diasporic public spheres.

People and images often meet unpredictably. Due to technological changes, in recent decades the imagination has become a collective, social fact. This leads to a plurality of imagined worlds, in which three distinctions can be made:

• The imagination has become a part of the quotidian mental work of ordinary people.
• Distinction between fantasy (leads to escape) and imagination (prepares to action).
• Collective dimension of the work of the imagination.

The five dimensions of global cultural flow are:

• Ethnoscapes
• Technoscapes
• Financescapes
• Mediascapes
• Ideoscapes

In this world’s global cultural flow both points of departure and points of arrival are in flux, and the search for steady points of reference can be very difficult.

Ann Kaplan, "Pretrauma Political Thrillers: Children of Men"

If the powerful effects of nature’s violence in the pretrauma climate scenarios seemed to offer a political intervention in terms of paying attention to global warming, other dystopian futurist films engage with politics more directly. The film studied here raises questions about human life on the edge of extinction because of infertility. As a political thriller, it addresses the dangers that are inherent in the corporate capitalism of the 20th and 21st centuries, capitalism that is directly related to environmental degeneration. Historical memory of the European fascist regimes that gave rise to World War II haunts the film, which is a political thriller, but at the same time it offers a pretraumatic world on the brink of disaster caused through human inattention to environmental change.

The continuum of past, present, and future seems built into our DNA (quite literally, if we are to believe evolutionary psychologists, who offer some evidence that, not having a basis for planning, the future can be traumatic). It seems traumatic for humans to be left without the sequence of past, present, and future. But trauma time is itself ambiguous. First, trauma’s temporality indeed collapses past, present, and future into one horrifying and paralyzing zone of fear. Second, this collapsing of time zones leaves humans living in a present that is characterized by trauma, creating the “trauma culture”. Cuarón is able in the first half of the film to demonstrate the ambiguity of trauma time as a collapsing of temporality into one timeless present and is then able, later, to indicate the historical moment as indeed that of pervasive trauma.

In Children of Men Cuarón is able to achieve a very complex film partly because of his mixture of genres in earlier projects. Children of Men is a crossover film in a technical sense, that is, it mixes documentary style and leftist politics with Hollywood action conventions. Universal Pictures, evidently nervous about Children, did not invest in elaborate marketing, and at first the film mainly played in the UK. It then got a big boost from the DVD, partly because of Žižek’s commentary. In adapting the elegant 1992 novel by P.D. James, Cuarón retained infertility as the central component of the narrative, although he also provided a political framing, a critique of capitalism that is absent in James’s work. Coming from Mexico, where there is an overproduction of babies, Cuarón is fully aware that in the more prosperous USA, there is already an underproduction of children.

The main action in Children of Men involves the protagonist Theo Faron, who saves the rare pregnant Afro-Caribbean Kee and brings her safely to the ship, which is aptly (and perhaps ironically) named the Tomorrow. There is a background story that is actually the real meaning of the film – only in this case it contains an explicitly political theme, namely, a critique of the post 9/11 Western capitalist response to that tragedy. This critique is visible in the images heavily oriented to UK, US, and global political crisis – 9/11, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and Guantánamo – to say nothing of the July 2005 bombings in London and Madrid. In interviews, Cuarón admits that his “iconography mostly came out of the media”.

Both Žižek and Cuarón in interviews and commentaries suggest that there are two stories in the film – that of the foregrounded, action-hero, Hollywood-style story in which the white male hero saves the black woman, the first female to become pregnant in eighteen years, and that of the background story that offers a critique of capitalism as we know it. The latter is, at least for Žižek, the real story of the film.

Most societies globally have already fallen apart due to infertility, and environmental disaster is in full view. But as the TV announcer tells us near the start of the film, "Britain soldiers on". Immigrants by the millions seek entry into Britain because there is still a semblance of society there. There is still food and shelter and a degree of order, and a nation which is theoretically a democracy but in fact (Cuarón’s point) essentially a dictatorship. Illegal immigrants are captured on arrival and imprisoned in camps without rights or recourse.

Pretrauma worlds such as these produce not only horrifying images of humans’ future, with possible traumatic effects on audiences, but also the trauma of not having a future at all, or of there being only a temporary one. It is perhaps this fear of the future that binds dystopia to utopia as a powerful aspect of human thought, repeated from generation to generation, and the binary of utopia/dystopia is a way of thinking that constantly leads Western culture astray.

There are three broad concepts of time in the film, each inspiring various corresponding emotions. The first time is a dystopian futureless present (2027), a time reflecting affects of loss, depression, anomie, cynicism. The second time is a melancholic, nostalgic looking-back to the utopian 1960s (when for a moment activists thought they could build a better society) and to a recent past in which infertility was normal. The third is a utopian, indeed messianic future, figured in the character of the Afro-Carebbean refugee (the "foogie", as the film calls her), Kee, whose miraculous pregnancy drives the action (and action-hero) aspect of the plot mandated by Hollywood. Each set of affects is brilliantly expressed not only through Cuarón’s much-cited innovative technical feats but also through the powerful musical score, which focuses especially on British composer.