REVIEW: A MOST WANTED MAN

Review Here

A Most Wanted Man              

I find the designs of these posters echoing each other for these two films quite interesting.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is about an American educated superstar Middle Eastern financial genius beginning to shine on Wall Street when 9-11 happens to him and he starts to become scapegoated. Then his girlfriend "betrays" him and that is the end of his time in the US as he goes home, becomes a religious leader. The Americans with their ham fisted approach to everything turned him into a formidable enemy.

There is also a true counterpart to these two stories of a religious leader who was assassinated by drone I think  and his US educated son was also assassinated - In A Most Wanted Man he is kidnapped. This is the meaning of our present strategy of pre-emptive threat. They figure the son will want to avenge the father, so they take out both.

Almost all of the reviews of AMWM have emphasized that both POV are understandable and blame cannot be assigned to either side.

People know what they do.

They frequently even know why they do what they do.

What they don't know is what they do, does.

Michel Foucault

American intelligence is drowning in information.

Information is not knowledge.

Knowledge is not made for knowing. Knowledge is for CUTTING.

Michel Foucault

Bachmann does understand that what the Americans want to do will have catastrophic consequences.While working in espionage he maintains as much of his integrity as is possible for him under the circumstances; his human moral sense of ethics. He realizes that his generation is no longer in charge, and he is confronting the Deleuzian Body Without Organs, the machinic. He tries to deal and decides to trust.

And he makes one fatal mistake.

In his last meeting with Robin Wright he deals. He accepts his perfidy and says to her that something must make it worthwhile. What is it that she tells herself that makes it worth while for her.

Wright says, "To make the world a safer place."

And in his last meeting with all of them he ends with his final statement to them,

"To make the world a safer place." 

Is Bachmann mocking her or does he really believe it, does he want to believe it, the sentence is ambiguous.

He is mirroring Wright's words to all of them including Wright.

What he doesn't know is that she didn't believe what she said, or did she? It was a "floating signifier" acting as a mask denying the utterance, the jargon of ideology - propaganda. Or did she perceive her own false belief in that ideology when he mirrors her in the meeting. Her face is a marvel of ambiguity at this moment. 

She will make him pay for mirroring her whichever way it went for her: mocking her or sincerely felt words that call her use of that sentence to him as sham.

Le Carre's real name is Cornwell. Members of his family took part in the making of this film and you will see them listed in the credits. Knowing a number of interviews he has done, he believes that the facts of our present world can best be understood in the context of fiction. 

His fiction is permeated with bitter truth.

We are seeing this film post Snowden and that makes all the difference. 

Snowden is an EVENT whose irruptions and echoes will be felt for as long as anyone now living is alive, and beyond. 

It is not possible that Seymour Hoffman did not know that the World is so damaged that it cannot be fixed. This movie reveals and conceals that awareness. We view the horror of the ending, the reality we already know is coming for them but we do not see the Zizekian INVISIBLE REAL.

All of them are totally evil. And their evil is total, so permeated and embedded in each one of them that EVIL IS INVISIBLE. 

These people are obscene. What they are doing is an obscenity.

They are all doing their job to "make the world a safer place."

The way Herzog writes about the jungle so drenched in sin that sin is invisible. The jungle is OBSCENE

LINK HERE

Clearly Seymour Hoffman sees this. And as Russell Brand says to an audience about his own heroin addiction - 10 years clean he says.

Heroin is not my problem. Reality is my problem.

We have this ideological belief that people suffer from addiction. They don't suffer from addiction. They suffer from reality. Our world is a reality no awake person can tolerate, cope with, or live in. Survive yes, but always there are those who desire and demand to live, 

not to survive.

No one has ever said it better than 

David Foster Wallace 

in his great novel

Infinite Jest.

Moneyball: The Order of Seduction and Challenge OR The Order of Production and Accumulation

Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill

The flashbacks of Billy Beane as a child, a young baseball player in high school, etc are shown in the order in which Beane/Pitt remembers them. While we may live our life linearly, we remember it in clusters.(Reconstruction - Josephine Hart)

As a child we see the joy and thrill in Billy's eyes. Playing. Then his child's uniform that makes him so proud. Little League probably. His doubt at signing so young with a full scholarship to Stamford in hand, the worry lines in his face that will deepen as he ages.

If you have ever loved baseball in any way, spent a great deal of time planning around games, then you will know the pure seduction of the game. Playing as a child puts you in Baudrillard's Order of Seduction and Challenge. It is a time you will always treasure, and in seeing this film, it all comes back, along with the feelings.

In the film we watch the great former Yankee Justice, now on the downward curve of his career. He is bitter. No wonder. A love of his life is coming to an end as it does for all of them. It's a terrible loss. Justice stands there and practices hitting a mechanical pitcher that keeps throwing the ball at him, keeping in shape, trying to maintain his edge as long as he can. But now we observe Justice in the Order of Production and Exchange, no longer in the Order of Seduction and Challenge. And this is a sad moment, a real moment, a Baudrillardian moment.

This moment will happen to all of us, unless we reflect on it carefully.

An object does not exist until and unless it is observed. - William Burroughs

This moment came very soon to Billy Beane, the boy of such great promise who couldn't deliver. Brad Pitt enlightens us as he reveals his superior intelligence to us. An intelligence that perhaps wanted more than just physical expertise and eye hand coordination in playing a game? He knows when destiny opens that window to him in the form of Pete/Jonah Hill, the recent Yale graduate, who has invented a mathematical model for predicting the value of undervalued players. He gets on base being the mantra. 

And so begins the change in the Dominating Discourse of major league scouting. Gone completely now the Order of Seduction and Challenge as baseball enters the Order of Production and Exchange, a mathematical calculation spreadsheet that determines who gets chosen.

Joltin' Joe DiMaggio

Will winning games ever replace the thrill of seeing DiMaggio in motion on the field or at the plate? Or watching the aged Satchel Paige come in as relief pitcher for the Indians at home in Cleveland in 1953? Finally in the big leagues at last.

Young Satchel Paige

By Saam Philadelphia Sports Announcer

Or the Phillies' Whiz Kids, or Bobby Feller the first $100,000 check in baseball? Or By Saam's excitement on radio and then TV as "It's going! It's going! It's over the fence!"  




In  Connie Mack Stadium at Shibe Park. No, I cannot even remember 








who won the games I watched when I saw these players. Nor I bet did 



Hemingway when he wrote Old Man and the Sea. This model is














going to implode the game just as Scummit is imploding the 
Hollywood machine. Unless the personalities remain intact, as is seen at the end of the movie. Let us pray.

Philip Seymour Hoffman

Pitt of course is remarkable in this film. But then he always is, after being used as eye candy when young with his self-described "wonder-bread look". 

Seymour Hoffman is that special character actor who always surprises without surprising us. How does he do it!

Connie Mack

Connie Mack was the original owner and mastermind of the Philadelphia Athletics, now the Oakland Athletics. I cannot forgive them for leaving for the West Coast. They played at Shibe Park, later renamed Connie Mack Stadium in honor of the original.

Shibe Park - Connie Mack Stadium

Billy Beane received the "gift" of a large contract offer when just out of high school.

Has he given the "counter-gift" that will destroy baseball

as Baudrillard gave Foucault the "counter gift"

with his book Forget Foucault.
???????????????????

Review: Moneyball; Foucault and the Dominating Discourse;The CUT

Moneyball is not an art film, an Oscar film, a best anything film. What it is is a "Foucauldian CUT" about the Discourse of baseball. Just like Warhohl's Campbell Soup Can in art historical criticism and Stephenie Meyer's Twilight in the history of sexuality.

The Foucauldian grid of power/knowledge so revealed and concealed in Ides of March is front and center in Moneyball. The grid is revealed clearly in the Discourse. In one of the first scenes we see Billy Beane/Brad Pitt in a manager meeting with his field coaches. They have lost their three major players and must rebuild their team with less than a million dollars, a quarter of a million dollars to be exact for the Oakland A's who will be up against Boston, the Yankees, etc, the multi-million dollar clubs. They have been the farm team for the big players. And isn't Hollywood the same. The independents develop the unknown stars who win awards, and the big studios grab them. and then ruin them in some franchise or CGI dumb fuck film or other.

Agnes Martin - a visual power/knowledge grid

So we listen to the Discourse of the general manager and his under managers. These men know baseball. They have often been players themselves when younger. Including Billy Beane whose backstory we get in bits and pieces of flashback. Handled very well I think.

They talk about how they throw, how they hit, how they play, whether they have ugly girlfriends (men who have ugly girlfriends lack confidence) and so on. This folks is the Dominating Discourse of locker room coach picking new talent to recruit.

It is physical talk, psychological talk, interpretive talk, theoretical talk. It goes round and round like picking a deck chair on the Titantic. This is what the Dominating Discourse sounds like in any field of study. It is the Foucauldian Grid of power/knowledge in linguistic action. When you are in it, you are like the goldfish in the water, in the bowl.

Beane/Pitt keeps saying they don't have the money to compete, that they must "think different". What does thinking different mean? How? Impossible within the Discourse. This is what Foucault spent his life doing. Teaching us to think differently. To follow Nietzsche and think genealogically. Thinking genealogically, says Baudrillard, and I agree, is the ONLY way to think.

Beane/Pitt goes to a higher up meeting to bargain and meets a young man, a very fat young man, whom he talks to aggressively. Jonah Hill/Pete is a math and stat wizard recently graduated from Yale and he has developed a model for picking talent. Mathematically. With spreadsheets. Beane/Pitt goes with him all the way.

And the managers' Discourse begins to change as Beane/Pitt tells them what they are gonna do now. They argue, dismiss, but Beane is the General Manager with the authority, so subterfuge and undermining begins. Seymour Hoffman is the field manager who is most articulate and stubborn, refusing to do it. Pitt begins to trade his players out from under him to force him.

The team Pitt/Beane and Jonah/Pete have assembled must be used for the purpose they assembled them for, not for the whim and purpose of the field managers.

Ignaz Semmelweis

I digress here to discuss the same Discourse roadblock concerning women's childbirth. Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis was a Hungarian doctor saying that doctors should wash their hands with antiseptic before assisting in childbirth. A furor akin to the managers in Moneyball erupted. This is what happens when a change in the Discourse begins to occur.


...statements like Dr. Charles Meigs', a leading obstetrician and teacher from Philadelphia: “Doctors are gentlemen, and gentleman’s hands are clean”, were the attitude of the time. So women continued to die in larger numbers when male doctors assisted them in hospitals, but less so when midwives did, or when they gave birth at home. Such is the power of the Dominating Discourse. Semmelweis was committed to an asylum and died at 47 in an asylum. He could not prove his assertions.


A Discourse is composed of words and they often kill.

Foucault: People know what they say. Frequently they know why they say what they say. What they don't know is what they say does.


As the Oakland Athletics go on a winning streak the likes of which have not been seen in a very long time: 20 games in a row! Resonating beautifully with that subtle and marvelous book by Paul Auster The Music of Chance.

Beane/Pitt is offered a contract with Boston for 12 million, the highest offer any general manager has ever been offered or received. And along with that check, the Boston CEO tells him:

The game has changed. The older ones who keep on in the old way are finished. They are the dinosaurs.  Baseball will be done according to your model from now on. What you have done with a quarter of a million against millions to be spent on a team by us and by the Yankees, to beat us and show us, has changed the game.

And this is the "FOUCAULDIAN CUT"! In just a few sentences the Dominating Discourse has changed. And as Foucault has told us it can change with lightening speed.

Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

It is a cousin to Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It is different. Kuhn has demonstrated with Pasteur that change does occur in scientific paradigms, but it is slow as the older dinosaurs in power must die out.  Reading Kuhn through Foucault it is the Discourse that must die out, the power/knowledge grid in any given field that must change. And Discourses do not change in all fields at once. It seems like a meteor hit the dinosaurs though. An EVENT coming from "elsewhere" unpredictable, unplanned, unprogrammed, unprecidented, an aberration.

At the end we are shown 2 Events. Seymour Hoffman sends in a pinch hitter. The Oakland A's have had an 11 home run lead towards their 20 game in a row winning streak. Now they are tied 11-11. The pinch hitter chosen for exactly that by the stats, hits the winning home run for a 12 -11 win for the A's. Almost an Event except that it had been predicted by the stats. Then Jonah/Pete shows Beane/Pitt a film. An overly heavy player hits and runs to the base and then slides back not knowing he has hit a home run. Astonished he runs around the bases. This is the Event described by Foucault.

Seymour Hoffman is so excellent in every film he does. He is always Seymour Hoffman and always the character he plays. In the same way Humphrey Bogart inhabited his character and was still Humphrey Bogart. No matter how small the part, he owns it.

Brad Pitt does not look healthy. He has aged far too much in such a short time. Nicotine is taking its toll on him.

Review: Ides of March: A Foucault Look At US Politics

Director:	George Clooney
Writers:	George Clooney Grant Heslov
Actors:	Ryan Gosling George Clooney Marisa Tomei Evan Rachel Wood Philip Seymour Hoffman Paul Giamatti Max Minghella Jeffrey Wright
Producers:	George Clooney Leonardo DiCaprio(executive) Grant Heslov

   This is a subtle, dazzling movie. Clooney's direction is sure, inspired and perfect. The cast couldn't be better and that includes Clooney. The music enhances, it doesn't tell you how you are supposed to feel. I think we can see how the power shift is occurring in Hollywood by looking at the players above. What this film has is integrity, something that is lacking in most major productions in tinseltown.

Clooneyis handsome and idealistically sincere. His idealism is real and it begins to show cracks before we see the break. As his idealism turns into cynicism his facial mask becomes that of a liar.  

Gosling is as always perfectly intense, intensely perfect. Beginning as idealistic very smart press secretary to 

Seymour Hoffman's superior position in charge of Clooney's campaign for the nomination, he is the tough cynical warhorse.  

Tomei is the seductive tough journalist using everything she's got, 

Giamatti could play  smart sleaze in his sleep.

And Evan Rachel Wood ..... well, Dylan says it best:

Just Like a Woman

. . . . . . .

She takes just like a woman,

And she aches just like a woman

   And she wakes just like a woman,   

Yea, but she cries just like a little girl.

             

.......

You take just like a woman,

And you wake just like a woman

And you make love just like a woman,

But you break just like a little girl.

The secret in this movie is the invisible Foucauldian Grid of power/knowledge. It is the structure of the film, one we cannot see with our eyes. It appears to be just another movie of fatal flaws, fatal mistakes, loss of idealism with the oncoming of cynicism as we see in Gosling's face at the end. 

Just another disappointing lack of integrity in a politician and the people who work for him in his campaign. But it isn't. 

What it is showing us is the impossibility of integrity in a political campaign. While I don't think Clooney believes this, he also probably isn't steeped in Foucault as I am. Caught in the interstices of the Grid, no one can wiggle free. Perhaps it was never possible but it was never so obvious as it is now. So observed as it is now. The hypocrisy is voiced in the dialogue, but the exposure of hypocrisy is not enough. It is only a distraction. It is only Deterrence from the real observed very fine mesh of the grid of power/knowledge.

The system is not at fault. the politicians are not at fault. In fact no one is at fault. The Grid is the structure. Genealogy is the method that exposes it. Foucault expanding on Nietzsche's genius.       

Foucault spent his life giving us the genealogy of power in the way it fuses and is always in a functional relation with knowledge. Power/Knowledge is fused, melded, inseparable. Power is in a functional relation with  Knowledge. Power is not something someone has, a government has, a president has, or a person can have. It does not oppress us from the top down, contrary to our perception, our belief, our unquestioning understanding. Power is not something someone has or does not have, something someone gives you or takes from you. One person can dominate another, but that is not power, and it can shift at any time.

Power/Knowledge is a functional relation and nowhere is it made so crystal clear as in The Ides of March. 

If you want a more traditional review go to Ebert here. Ebert says in his review, The film also raises the question of whether it is possible for any candidate to win and yet remain true to his original values. He's just a whisper away from Foucault, eh. Then come back for a Foucauldian analysis. I’ll wait.

Here’s one of my favorite visuals for the Foucault Grid of Power/Knowledge: Agnes Martin. She painted lots of these grids BTW.

Agnes Martin

An object does not exist until and unless it is observed. - William Burroughs