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?