Falling Into A Social Media Vortex (Editorial)

FALLING INTO A SOCIAL MEDIA VORTEX

Ever had something in your eye?  The instance when whatever-it-is gets in there, it becomes the single greatest priority of your life -- getting it out.  The foreign object could be the tiniest speck of flotsam, but to you, that very second, that speck approximates the size of a bolder and you'll do the craziest things to remove it, if it means standing on your head, running garden hose water over raw sockets, or pulling your eyelid over your eyelashes like a cheap window shade in hopes of dislodging it.   It is virtually impossible to think of anything else but the excruciating pain associated with that speck until it is gone.

A little over a year ago, in a temporary moment of extreme mind-numbing boredom, I looked up "Behind The Scenes -- Feature Films" videos on youtube.  In the olden days, we channel surfed television.  Now we randomly Google and watch any flicker that pops up.  I saw some very informative and interesting videos.  Awesome.  I thought, I love the internet.  Then...

I saw a short documentary about the making of the movie version of "Le Miserables" and was instantly taken aback by how ugly the actors looked with rotten teeth and the disgusting filth they wallowed in.  Wow.  Big stars treated like garbage...  Not exactly on the top of my list of "fun things to watch". 

As the video went on, I learned the plot of the feature film they were making centered on a prostitute who dies...and, in a second layer of recognizing and not liking the negativity involved in the film, I was turned off by the idea of possibly watching a hammy-acted hideous hooker slowly die for two hours in the worst kind of soap opera drivel, particularly when involving "actress" Anne Hathaway whose "career" seems unexplainable from the get-go.  Where's the entertainment value in that package? 

As a feminist and anti-human trafficking supporter, this film wasn't winning points with me -- fast.  As a film-maker, even less.  Once more, in a block-buster Hollywood film, for what appeared to be the millionth film outing, the leading characteristic the part of the "hooker" called for was a vagina and not much else, a skanky one as usual, who gets her comeuppance for being sexual by having to die a horrible death by the time the final credits roll.  Ugh.  It's the worst kind of pornography without the graphic sex scenes pay-off.  It was tedious, well-worn, thread-bare story-telling about something not worth repeating.

The "live singing" choice of having the actors recorded while singing on-set instead of in a recording studio was the "all-she-wrote" tipping-point for my overwhelming emotional dislike of what I was seeing, then hearing, which sky-rocketed into pure hatred.  Corny, rambling, cartoon-ish -- I couldn't take the warbling even in small doses in a youtube video, similar to listening to a yelping child in their bedroom, belting out a made-up nonsense song at the top of their lungs that...does...not...stop... only in this case, it was grown-adult, award-winning professionals doing the squawking who expected all of us to pay for the privilege of seeing them at their worst possible and, unfortunately, hearing them as well.

As a fellow film-maker, I can not imagine what the cast and crew of this pathetic film were thinking during the proceedings -- it's not engaging visually, the soundtrack is awash with off-key singing about subjects unworthy of a song, and the plot's cruelty and degradation was unending.  How about some contrasts, some context, some glimmer of a better life, the way real life is?  Nope. This was the movie equivalent of getting poked in the eye with a stick while your eardrums burst from a cacophony of squealing tires just before a car wreck and no one on set, no producer or director or actor, could deduce they were making a film that "did not demand to be made"?

I don't care about the popular Broadway version or the over-two-thousand-page original novel by Victor Hugo (which was panned by critics when first published as being a "rambling mess").  I only know what I saw and what I saw was terrible on many, many levels, beyond comprehension.

Can't anyone besides me tell media's agenda is -- and always has been -- about misogyny?  The only differences between "Le Miserables" and "Fifty Shades of Grey" is 1) "Grey" is the pretty version of the same kind of degradation, 2) "Le Mis" beats up a guy for a while too, as a reminder of who the "alpha" truly is -- old, White, rich, educated, European men who mercilessly rule with their penises while living in perpetual secret fear of castration and anal rape.  Pretty.

I recalled watching the TV show "NYPD Blue" about the horrid lives of cops in New York, filmed with low lighting in a fake cinema-verte style where you couldn't focus on anything because the camera man is swirling the frame indiscriminately about the dark scene with the intention of making it "real", like a documentary. The "show" was gut-wrenching, week after week, with hostility and violence and death, a single piano key repeatedly banged. I wondered why these characters didn't kill themselves to be out of their relentless misery since obviously they had no reason to live (particularly after the bald, over-weight main character -- who had a face full of pock-marks -- had a cheating ugly wife who divorced him in a nasty manner, she dies of cancer, then his ugly kid dies from a different disease, and then his ugly cop-partner is randomly shot to death in front of him, bleeding profusely on the cement as a cliff-hanger before the final commercial break).  After all that ugliness, I was overwhelmed with depression to the point that I saw little to live for myself, being in a world where this kind of crap -- a piss-poor world view -- is passed off as "entertainment".  In actuality, in total, I only saw three episodes of this highly-touted TV downer.  That was enough.  That was too much.

That's why I felt compelled to say something in the comment section of youtube about "Le Mis", about how we need to be uplifted every so often, how so much time, energy, money and creativity (not to mention perfectly good film stock) was wasted on perpetuating the worst parts of the human experience when so much positive is all around us.  That's what I posted my comments on -- about the ugly, awful, offensive movie -- a movie I never intend to see in full in this lifetime and the reasons for that decision -- and what that film's responsibility was to the culture and what was represented within the film to me personally, as man and an artist -- which was hopelessness, particularly if you happen to be a woman. That film's message was: if you are a woman, you are nothing but a kind of human ash tray with no skills, whose only minor value is of a passive receptacle for men's lust and subsequent semen, from which you get pregnant, diseases or death...or all of the above. Yikes.  Good choice, Anne Hathaway.  She followed this glorious role with playing a "princess" in a Disney movie, after playing a ditz who gives up a career to make her man happy in "The Devil Wears Prada". Yes, they got my money -- several times over -- and more time of my life I will never get back.  Please, shoot me before I "movie" again.

The irony -- being called names (cyber-bullying) in response to my posting by a loose-cannon lynch mob who claim to "love the film", were "inspired" by it, yet, didn't seem to understand the intricacies of the film's subtext enough to give ME (a real-live person and not a fictional movie character) a moment's doubt -- was palpable.  The attacks were fast and furious, droning on in surreal twists and turns of logic, half-thoughts and sorry attempts at humiliation humor pointed toward me. No one bothered to talk facts or plot-points or counter with a personal experience with substance -- just angry villagers at the gate with torches, ready to kill in a true mob-mentality emotional mania.

Not liking what I think is one thing, trying to talk me out of the experience I truly have is another.  I know what I saw.  No one can tell me different.  Yet...They did -- on and on.  How I hate -- LOATHE -- the internet.

One of the many criticisms I've faced was about "forgetting", as in "we have to keep making these types of films for a younger generation who may not realize history and therefore might be doomed to repeat it", except, that's exactly what these films do -- repeat the same nauseating story without the slightest variation, without a plan of action for change, without context, without a "why" attached, while simultaneously desensitizing us to the harsh realities the films are trying to evoke.  Movies aren't factual history, folks. Wise up.

If kids grew up in a world without racism, then a film about how awful racism has been, can be, is presently, would be moot. The kids would only know what they know and would instantly see how pointless a film like that would be.  But kids do live in a world of racism -- learned -- starting with the non-stop agenda of media perpetuating poison such as insisting on the reality of stereotypes ala "Le Mis", "Fifty Shades..." and countless others.  Hollywood-made films do not assume an audience's intelligence or ability for change.  Producers assume and pander to an audience's lowest base fears, doubts, guilt and shame and stays there, festering. 

It's our fault -- the consumers -- for not speaking out and I did and now I regret it.  We are the enemy.  We go to movies to "feel something" -- the more tragic the better -- but are relieved to leave it behind once the lights come up and use defensiveness to justify "survivor's guilt", while paying lip service to "empathy" for fictional characters. Movie hookers are beloved.  Real hookers are an invisible public nuisance no one wants to think about.

I am beyond tired of "race" films: everything from "Birth of a Nation", "Roots", "A Raisin In The Sun", "Sounder", "The Help", "Amistad", "The Butler", "Twelve Years A Slave", "The Color Purple" to "She's Gotta Have It" and more.  Okay.  I get it.  Racism is terrible.  Martin Luther King gave us a direction and positive tools to apply.  His words are truths that can not be denied.  He taught love and acceptance.  Big-budget films wallow in self-pity and victimization and do not spend one minute, one penny, on successes, prevention or punishment for those who do harm, therefore, becoming the problem instead of the solution. What did "Selma" really say and to whom did it say it to?

That ass-kissing populist, Oprah, makes one divisive film after another designed to give viewers of all races "White Guilt", only I haven't done anything wrong to feel guilty about.  What does Oprah want from me?

As a woman of Color, well over fifty years of age, wealthy, "successful", Oprah seems to have no insight or wisdom about how to achieve what she calls "living with authenticity" in this era (the only "truth", according to her, being that Black people have been treated badly in the past) as I hold her personally responsible for continuing the cycle of racism by making films which hold us to a standard which no longer applies, while stern-fast ignoring present situations good and bad.  Let's move forward together, Ms. Winfred, not continually look back in anger, pointing fingers while steeped in self-righteousness.  My finger is now pointed at Ms. Winfred and politely ask, "Where's 'The Oprah Winfred Story' or the 'How Obama Became President' documentary?" How is a private girl's school in Africa she supports countering or connecting the dots with the millions world-wide who saw her beaten down in every movie she's been associated with?  How is the OWN network different from other networks when every show it broadcasts assumes something is wrong with you (like Oprah magazine does) that needs to be fixed?

I am sick of "holocaust", "Nazi" and "Hitler" films for similar reasons. Enough already.  I'm intolerant of movies about the Crucifixion of Christ.  How about focusing on the "miracles" of Christ's life, like feeding people, healing the sick, telling off the corrupt churches?  How many times do we really need to see the guy being sliced up and nailed to the Cross?  Look it up.  There's hundreds of Bible-related movies.  There have been over six "Ben Hur" movies alone. Why?  Thank you, Mel Gibson, not only for your perverse body of film works but for the dangerous ranting of a lunatic recorded for the whole world to see and hear as popular culture entertainment.  Exhibit A, ladies and gentlemen of the court...

On-line punks (most of whom are not Caucasian and free to speak their minds) tell me I'm "wrong" about all of this when all I've done is shared an honest opinion, as I'm doing this instant.  Their reactions are not an open dialogue with someone you disagree with, a teaching opportunity, as if I've asked anyone to agree or disagree with anything I say, do, or am.

What I believe I experienced was a cultural mini-melt-down which is widening every passing second, a small dose of what is currently happening in this country and around the globe -- a tiny glimpse into the fragile, confused psyches of the masses after a racially-motivated cop killing, a natural disaster or when people realize they've been manipulated by politics, religion, the media or even their own parents, after a repressive lifetime of consuming toxic media and sanitizing political-correctness. Truth hurts as much as it sets you free and maybe freedom, including that of thought itself, isn't a consideration these days.  You can only "like" on facebook.

The on-line trolls who are the most vocal in social media inevitably kill the messenger, overtly through intimidation or through passive "shunning". They live their life in the anonymous shadows, faceless and formless, uselessly toiling on a machine to recreate reality in the image of The System, as aptly described in the novel "1984", so fantastically acted out for them in the movies and repeated in offensive postings aimed at me, but not who I am -- what I represent to them. Life imitating art and vice-versa, survival of the fittest via viral platform formatting.

It has now been over a year later and they're still out there, day and night, on every continent imaginable, picking apart the five sentences I wrote one night on that one posting about one movie out of the hundreds of thousands that have been made, the subject of one video out the millions on the internet, read and responded repeatedly to no particular end.  The commenting is petty and small and, most of all, irritating because there is so little that can be done about it and so much more good things to celebrate -- like something that gets in your eye and you just want it to be gone to get on with your life, happy when it is finally gone.