This video does contain some pretty disturbing imagery of people receiving shock therapy and other forms of state-sanctioned violence. So consider yourself warned before you click "play."
The Shock Doctrine is the name of the most recent book by Naomi Klein (her earlier work, No Logo, was an international bestseller and became a handbook of sorts for the anti-globalization movement). (You can read more about the book and its author at naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine; she also lays out her argument more extensively in a series of six videos on YouTube, beginning with "The Shock Doctrine: Part One"; finally, you can also check out the NYT review of the book.)
This short video, created to promote the release of the book, was co-created by Klein and Alfonso Cuarón (and directed by Cuarón's son, Jonas). This is not the first time the two have collaborated: Klein is a commentator on the DVD of Cuarón's most recent film, Children of Men (if you haven't seen it yet, it should promptly be moved to number 1 in your Netflix queue). Apparently, Cuarón was initially reluctant to be involved with this project--until he read the book. (For more on his involvement, click here.)
This is the first time I've seen a short film used to advertise a book; yet this video purports to be a bit more than an advertisement--it was shown at film festivals in Venice and Toronto. The book's argument is that, just as CIA interrogators may have used shock therapy to break down its prisoners, "shock therapy" has been necessary to institute the free market reforms central to the economic history of the last fifty years (Klein calls it "disaster capitalism"). The NYT reviewer calls Klein's reliance on this metaphor "overdramatic and unconvincing," but Cuarón and his son clearly found it visually compelling.
In fact, the feel of this short film is very much in line with dystopic aesthetic of Children of Men. They did not invent this aesthetic, of course: its true source is the infamous Abu Ghraib photos. (How many movies have you seen in the last couple of years in which someone gets a black bag thrown over his or her head?)
And what about the barbed wire morphing into a flowering vine?
This comment actually responds to Nate's and Jill's.
Nate, I like your point about graphic novels, and I had not thought of it before. However, nether Children of Men nor Pan's Labyrinth were adapted from graphic novels, as far as I know. Those are two of the films I was thinking of when I mentioned the black bags; the third was V for Vendetta. And in fact, the latter was written between 1982 and 1988, so if it is a maturation of the genre, it tool place a while back. Nonetheless, I think your argument that a lot of these films are emerging from "visual formats" is compelling--especially given the glut of comic book movies we've also seen recently. But what is more interesting to me is that in many cases, these dystopic aesthetics are drawing pretty extensively on the Abu Ghraib images. Those images have really been taken up by the culture (or at least the culture-makers) as emblems of what it means to live in an age of "extraordinary rendition" (I like Orwell's word for it better: vaporization).
Which brings me to Jill's point: there is another absent presence for Klein, specifically the writings of Giorgio Agamben. These videos were actually first pointed out to me in the context of a discussion about Agamben (and in fact, a colleague deserves credit for pointing out their relationship to Agamben's work). Agamben writes a lot about the "state of exception" or the state of emergency that is everywhere becoming the norm. He sees the "camp" as the epitome of the localization of this "state of exception": it is the place where the subject is stripped of all her "rights" and "just lives bare life." That is, it's the place where the primal organizing factor of state power--the power of the sovereign (or the state) to decide who lives or dies--is most evident, i.e. is the rule rather than the exception, and where the welfare of the prisoner is solely dependent on the good or bad will of the camp guard. (In Klein's argument, the "Green Zone" in Baghdad falls into this category; and the recent debates about the role of Blackwater emphasize how much, in such situations, depends on the will of individuals with the power to decide who lives and dies.) The concentration camps of Nazi Germany are for Agamben the primary example of this phenomenon, but in Homo Sacer he argues that "we must admit that we find ourselves virtually in the presence of a camp every time such a structure is created, independent of the kinds of crime that are committed there" (174). Abu Ghraib would be another example; so would Guantanamo Bay.
All of which is to say, in response to both Nate's and Jill's comments, that the aesthetics of Guantanamo (if you want to call it that) are becoming the primary dystopic aesthetics of our time (and in the best dystopic tradition, the truth is that the nightmare is already here), and furthermore, to ask whether the images of Abu Ghraib are replacing the "older" images of concentration camps--and to ask if this replacement indicates that Agamben is right when he says that places like Guantanamo are "of a piece" with the political thinking that produced the camps as such? (V for Vendetta is clearly relying on images influenced by both: black hoods and scenes of torture and juxtaposed against gruesome shots of mass graves.)
Submitted by Jillian Sayre on Mon, 2007-10-01 15:43.
Wow. Although Marx never makes an appearance in the text, the film itself is an interesting example of Marxist rhetoric. In the narration, as the "shock" metaphor breaks down in the film and is replaced by "crisis" I was intrigued by the visual presence of Friedman and the huge gaping hole where Marx should be. Marx's crisis theory, the cyclical destruction of profit that necessitates the continued presence of an aggressive and ultimately self-destructive capitalist system, seems to serve as Friedman's foundation. Yet no figurehead of Marxist thought is offered visually. Any leftist or resistant figures are in mass, behind signs, unnamed, unrecognizable. This is opposed to the head shots and naming of Friedman, Nixon, and Reagan.
But beyond crisis theory the film itself seems to rely on a crisis itself - the stagnation of a progressive narrative based on Hegelian dialectics. A great deal of the film is in (sometimes grainy) black and white, and moves from the familiar lilting voice of the science film, through Klein's narration, and BACK to the image from the beginning. Even the color shots used in the film remain grainy, distant; the colors themselves are muted, they feel old. Klein's crisis (only a crisis provokes action, she reminds us, and she definitely wants to provoke action) is to suffocate us with the past, with our own failure to progress, our stagnation through seeming change.
Submitted by Nate Kreuter on Sun, 2007-09-30 00:30.
For those curious about the references to the CIA's experimentation with shock therapy and other methods of "rendition," Mark Bowden's 2003 Atlantic Monthly article "The Dark Art of Interrogation" is a good place to start. My students just read the article for my Rhetoric of Spying Class.
I think, Tim, that along with the Children of Men connection, it's interesting (though I'm not sure what it means) that many recent popular comments on dystopia have originated in visual formats, rather than traditionally literary ones. V for Vendetta comes to mind immediately and is, as far as I know, the first graphic novel to be adapted to the screen, other than traditional comic books like Batman and Superman. I think this is an indication of the maturation of the graphic novel as a genre, with works like Blankets, by Craig Thompson, expanding the genre even into the literary nonfiction sphere, which would have been unthinkable not too long ago.
Comments
Graphic Novels and Absent Presences
This comment actually responds to Nate's and Jill's.
Nate, I like your point about graphic novels, and I had not thought of it before. However, nether Children of Men nor Pan's Labyrinth were adapted from graphic novels, as far as I know. Those are two of the films I was thinking of when I mentioned the black bags; the third was V for Vendetta. And in fact, the latter was written between 1982 and 1988, so if it is a maturation of the genre, it tool place a while back. Nonetheless, I think your argument that a lot of these films are emerging from "visual formats" is compelling--especially given the glut of comic book movies we've also seen recently. But what is more interesting to me is that in many cases, these dystopic aesthetics are drawing pretty extensively on the Abu Ghraib images. Those images have really been taken up by the culture (or at least the culture-makers) as emblems of what it means to live in an age of "extraordinary rendition" (I like Orwell's word for it better: vaporization).
Which brings me to Jill's point: there is another absent presence for Klein, specifically the writings of Giorgio Agamben. These videos were actually first pointed out to me in the context of a discussion about Agamben (and in fact, a colleague deserves credit for pointing out their relationship to Agamben's work). Agamben writes a lot about the "state of exception" or the state of emergency that is everywhere becoming the norm. He sees the "camp" as the epitome of the localization of this "state of exception": it is the place where the subject is stripped of all her "rights" and "just lives bare life." That is, it's the place where the primal organizing factor of state power--the power of the sovereign (or the state) to decide who lives or dies--is most evident, i.e. is the rule rather than the exception, and where the welfare of the prisoner is solely dependent on the good or bad will of the camp guard. (In Klein's argument, the "Green Zone" in Baghdad falls into this category; and the recent debates about the role of Blackwater emphasize how much, in such situations, depends on the will of individuals with the power to decide who lives and dies.) The concentration camps of Nazi Germany are for Agamben the primary example of this phenomenon, but in Homo Sacer he argues that "we must admit that we find ourselves virtually in the presence of a camp every time such a structure is created, independent of the kinds of crime that are committed there" (174). Abu Ghraib would be another example; so would Guantanamo Bay.
All of which is to say, in response to both Nate's and Jill's comments, that the aesthetics of Guantanamo (if you want to call it that) are becoming the primary dystopic aesthetics of our time (and in the best dystopic tradition, the truth is that the nightmare is already here), and furthermore, to ask whether the images of Abu Ghraib are replacing the "older" images of concentration camps--and to ask if this replacement indicates that Agamben is right when he says that places like Guantanamo are "of a piece" with the political thinking that produced the camps as such? (V for Vendetta is clearly relying on images influenced by both: black hoods and scenes of torture and juxtaposed against gruesome shots of mass graves.)
Black, White, and Re(a)d all over: Marxist Rhetoric
Wow. Although Marx never makes an appearance in the text, the film itself is an interesting example of Marxist rhetoric. In the narration, as the "shock" metaphor breaks down in the film and is replaced by "crisis" I was intrigued by the visual presence of Friedman and the huge gaping hole where Marx should be. Marx's crisis theory, the cyclical destruction of profit that necessitates the continued presence of an aggressive and ultimately self-destructive capitalist system, seems to serve as Friedman's foundation. Yet no figurehead of Marxist thought is offered visually. Any leftist or resistant figures are in mass, behind signs, unnamed, unrecognizable. This is opposed to the head shots and naming of Friedman, Nixon, and Reagan.
But beyond crisis theory the film itself seems to rely on a crisis itself - the stagnation of a progressive narrative based on Hegelian dialectics. A great deal of the film is in (sometimes grainy) black and white, and moves from the familiar lilting voice of the science film, through Klein's narration, and BACK to the image from the beginning. Even the color shots used in the film remain grainy, distant; the colors themselves are muted, they feel old. Klein's crisis (only a crisis provokes action, she reminds us, and she definitely wants to provoke action) is to suffocate us with the past, with our own failure to progress, our stagnation through seeming change.
CIA Interrogation Manual
For those curious about the references to the CIA's experimentation with shock therapy and other methods of "rendition," Mark Bowden's 2003 Atlantic Monthly article "The Dark Art of Interrogation" is a good place to start. My students just read the article for my Rhetoric of Spying Class.
I think, Tim, that along with the Children of Men connection, it's interesting (though I'm not sure what it means) that many recent popular comments on dystopia have originated in visual formats, rather than traditionally literary ones. V for Vendetta comes to mind immediately and is, as far as I know, the first graphic novel to be adapted to the screen, other than traditional comic books like Batman and Superman. I think this is an indication of the maturation of the graphic novel as a genre, with works like Blankets, by Craig Thompson, expanding the genre even into the literary nonfiction sphere, which would have been unthinkable not too long ago.