READING EVEREST THROUGH JEAN BAUDRILLARD

Climbing Everest Porn or Hero Porn

This is a good bio movie with fine performances. So let's get that out of the way. It has just the right number of good cliche scenes for the chicks who stay at home while hubbies buy their way into hero porn for 65 THOUSAND DOLLARS Or lead the expedition for 65 thousand a pop. It's true. And many died on this trip, and still freeze away on the mountain.

What is of importance though is watching the moving image of assembly line manufactured capitalistic romantic climbing of the highest mountain PORN! All the romance is gone however as the leader leads his merry band of bonding men who have no more wars to fight as tek does all that now, in a line worthy of a sargent into battle. Follow me! And they follow holding a rope as they go to keep them together, just like kindergarten plus kids out on a school trip.

They are cattle plodding along to maybe their death as they clump their way through the snow, avalanches to the heights of the top - or death. Imagine the first ones to do this. The long years of preparation, the solitary partnerships your life depended upon, the exaltation of achieving it, the risk of death. All taking place in the Symbolic Order of the Sacred:risk, reversibility, event, sacred, life, living, passion and then compare that with this film so wonderfully showing you this supposed event turned into the Order of Production:irreversibility, survival, continuity, accumulation, capital, fascination - in fact into the Production of Porn mountain climbing where if you pay enough you will do it and be guided back to safety. How's that!

The bonding of the men to each other in some drinking, buddying, back slapping, encouragement, out for a trek in the wilderness to show our stuff. No more wars to die for. No Christendom to spread, Nazis to kill, fascism to destroy before it destroys our freedom. Nope. So the successful ones who have the money or who scrape it together to LIVE THEIR DREAM! BECAUSE IT'S THERE!To fulfill the ideology they still believe. Wonderful!

We see our entire western world of DETERRITORIALIZED CORPORATE CAPITALISM monetizing an EVENT by replicating it with cell phones, high tech weather reports, group tourists going mountain climbing, the new eco type tourism. To see the hoards of people at the base camps, all the leaders of tourist groups squeezing in that window of opportune time for climbing to the peak.

This is not exploring how to get to the top. This is replicating the map of how to get to the top. Desiring to reach the top of Everest by being led there by a more experienced person. A teacher, one who leads. And they blindly follow.

Passion of Exploring the South Pole,Northwest Passage

In these essays Connell has recounted the extreme passion, desire,preparation and gamble these men went through to go there first without a map, just raw courage and dedication. The incredible hardships, the incredible death experiences are riveting. This is no account of a tourist guided trip but a REAL experience, felt with all their soul. Their exploration is not a COMMODITY to buy and do. NOT a trophy to tell about.

This is akin to Dr. Walter Palmer's killing of the great too domesticated sanctuary lion, Cecil. 
Cecil was not a wild lion but one used to being fed by humans from time to time I guess. He was lured with a bloody kill to be killed.

A Canned Hunt - A Trophy Killing without Risk

Another assembly line manufactured trophy porn SPECTACLE. Maybe they will want to climb Everest next. Would that be too dangerous for them? With a very experienced guide? 

All this is HERO PORN manufactured like Warhol's Campbell Soup Cans. The hero and his ordeal have been monetized by DETERRITORIALIZED CORPORATE CAPITALISM.

HOW DO YOU ALL LIKE YOUR WORLD?

How do you like your world?

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.