NOT a Review:Once Upon a time....In Hollywood

TARANTINO

10050 Cielo Drive - Manson Murders

Just go see it. Anything by Tarantino is worth more than you can imagine.

This film by the great MASTER is not great for what it says BUT FOR WHAT IT DOESN'T SAY. Tarantino has given us the INVISIBLE in this film.

So why do I say that? Let's take the ending first. Since this is not a review do I need to remind you of spoilers. I hope not. 

The Manson Murders are not in it. The murders are in the house next door as the murderers are so hyped up on WEED they dont even know which house is the one Manson wanted.

BUT. IF the murders had not been committed against the BRAND names of Hollywood and their BRAND name friends, would Manson have ever been implicated in his cult? It would have been just a two bit cowboy star on his way down down down and his stunt double. Not a big deal. Or someone just like him next door?

But the MANSON MURDERS performed by CULT members was fleshed out by the media, Polanski, his pregnant wife the beautiful new starlet Sharon Tate, and the Folger coffee heiress certainly got their attention. So Tarantino has given us a murder attempt that failed, but did not really fail as the murderers were brutally murdered. AND I MEAN BRUTALLY. 

I read this as an escalation fantasy. IF the Manson Murders were committed today, the horror would be far greater in brutality and visual imagery than the original I am thinking. Our idea of horror has escalated, so Hollywood has ordained, and we have obediently identified with the new. 

The Manson Murders were a Debordian SPECTACLE concealing the REAL. That it is not the murders the STATE is concerned with, BUT WHO IS MURDERED!  This is what Tarantino is telling you INVISIBLY.

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Tarantino is also telling you that the ante on HOW a murder may be staged has been upped. We see a performance by Brad Pitt of great violence. He will be criticized by every PC Feminist in the country and the world. In personal life he has had a reputation of well...... not being quite non-violent. As we have learned in reading murder mysteries, murders are often PERFORMED to deliver a MESSAGE as well as delivering the CONTENT, which is the murder itself. But it is the MESSAGE that is the most relevant, not the murder. The HOW. NOT THE WHY.

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There are so many very observant and subtle images of telling that can be easily overlooked.

How about the beautiful boy at the Spahn Ranch who rides the horse so perfectly. A cowboy within the Hollywood Cowboy genre at the Spahn Ranch, a set for early cowboy movies. He is lovely to look at. Take him off the horse, put him behind the wheel of a car and his aggressiveness to the women partners in crime announces his insecurity. As soon as he is walking on Ceilo Drive he is so insecure we would not notice him much, the way we did the beautiful boy with the beautiful body riding the horse. What is invisible is the real cowboy, who is being portrayed in the movies, and what life he is living. It will be Cormac McCarthy who will give us that story in his Border Trilogy. Three book that are McCarthy's way of giving us the history of the southwest from the 1930's to the present. And it is a loss we can never recover from. A history not in our school history books.

Tarantino layers and unlayers Hollywood for us. We have his dead eye on Beefcake with Brad Pitt, so often filmed that way in his earlier movies after Thelma and Louis with his shattering James Dean spectacle of a performance. Pitt is on the roof doing repairs and takes off his shirt as it is hot. We see this older Brad Pitt with a different body build from Achilles in Troy, a more adolescent slim sinewy look to him rather than middle aged beefy. And Pitt's performance is incredibly nuanced. Sometimes glimmers of the young Brad emerge and still the older man is there with this truly great performance of his age. He is one of the finest actors of his generation. DiCaprio is stunning in his insecurity. And the two play off each other in a way not seen so often. Especially in Hollywood. Tarantino's film is also a becoming extinct kind of movie in tinsel town. One without CGI, a throwback to what we loved in movies. The past is a memorial in this movie. Something unlikely to be seen much again. Hollywood has departed from this kind of quality.

There is not even a mediocre performance anywhere in this fine film. All are trustingly directed by Tarantino. 

Brad Pitt's Beefcake is filmed with such irony of the cliched way Hollywood does Beefcake. Tarantino includes it and makes fun of it simultaneously. That is what a great filmmaker doess.

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Skipping ahead to the young women at the Spahn Ranch under the influence of Manson and their WEED addiction the car ride to the murder is punctuated by a typical high conversation by young women with meaningless words in their heads. Fast forward to our recent de-criminalizing of this substance will mean you will hear much more of this kind of stupid talk from stupid people. It merges into the word salad of the insane. Get ready for it.

What is still invisible is that these young women under Manson's influence, are going to grow up, get older, and BREED. Tarantino places the pre-feminist in front of our eyes and ears and if you are perceiving them from the future they will be in you will shudder because you know them now in their old age. It is not pretty.

Once Upon A Time In.... Hollywood - Esquire Interview with Tarantino,DiCaprio, Pitt By Michael Hainey

What An Interview!

Reading this interview with The Three through Leslie Fiedler's critical essays, Le Carre's character Leiser in Looking Glass War, Roberto Bolano's 2666 and of course Luce Irigaray's SPECULUM of the Other Woman. 

Leiser smiled. It was the best ever, that week, John. It's funny, isn't it: we spend all our time chasing girls, and it's the men that matter; just the men. From 

Le Carre's Looking Glass War

SOME EXCERPTS:

The beginning of the interview

Pitt settles in, looks into a small...rise. He looks up and says, "There's nothing I can do about boner pants, is there?" 

Tarantino looks at him confused.

"Remember that Curb Your Enthusiasm episode?" Pitt says. "Where the woman thinks he popped one in the movie theater?" Tarantino laughs.

I offer Pitt a pillow. For his lap. He tries it for a minute and then flips it to the side.


Brad Pitt refers to his unintentional erection attributing it to his pants? Too tight? Hainey refers to women as CHICKS and that completes this good ol boy group sealing him the writer into its seams. 

Any woman is aware that in these days, if she were present, they would not be speaking this way. It would not be a Male Discourse only which is what we are reading.

This is the way men speak when women are not present.

In Bolano's 2666 it will be constantly  brought to your attention, especially during The Part About the Crimes - 300 plus pages of autopsies -  as the officers discuss the bodies, the crime scene, of the murdered women or their dumping as road kill in the desert,  as if they are commodities rather than victims of men. The only exception is the murdered bodies of the two kidnapped girls ages 14 and 9 is it? One of them weeps.

This is the way they talk about us when we are not present. Margot Robbie is in this film but she is not present at this Esquire Interview. 

Bolano will tell us that in these crimes in St. Teresa - exact copy of the real ones in Cuidad Juarez  - conceals

The Secret of the World.

Luce Irigaray will be more direct:

The world is ruled by male homosexual, homoerotic collusion that they know but do not know they know. Heterosexuality is the MASK that conceals this. 

Men hate openly gay men because then they have made themselves into commodities just like women. 

To be accumulated and exchanged.

And anyone familiar with the reviews, essays and writings of Leslie Fiedler will already know that ALL his work was directed at this undetected homoerotic homosexuality permeating all group activities where men gather together. He hones in on the great American novels: Moby Dick; Huckleberry Finn; and those of James Fenimore Cooper. Nor does Hemingway escape. He takes on football and the men who arbitrated the Treaty of Versailles to end up giving us Hitler and World war II. My rude awakening when I read Come Back To The Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey! (LINK is pdf for you) led to associations of my own that I had felt, but never uttered and hardly even dared to think I might have intuitively grasped something universal in the world until I was validated. Now of course I see it everywhere so here is a recent recognition in this Esquire interview which I am sharing here. 



As things are changing in Hollywood in 1969 Michael Hainey summarizes: 

MH: What's fascinating __ there is the rise of the pretty leading man, but there is also the rise of the anti-leading man. Again, look at 1969. Dustin Hoffman plays Ratso Rizzo in a corrupted western, Midnight Cowboy. And then, who is the complete embodiment of the new anti-leading man? Charles Manson! He's hairy and charismatic and young. Plus, he gets the chicks. And he literally steals the old dream factories from these guys; he's living on an old movie set. Manson usurps it all! Even the headlines. He becomes more famous than all of them.

BP : Right! Well put, well put.

Here Pitt comments on what Hainey has said. He does not say Wow! Nor does he just nod his head in agreement or say yes. The subtext I am reading here is the misogynist male automatic comment of placing a judgement on what Hainey has said. Right! Well put. well put. Pitt has assumed dominance here in the masculine DISCOURSE of this  conversation where Hainey is not asking questions but commenting on what the Three are saying, often to each other. Sort of like women tend to do in this situation.

Or is Pitt assuming the femme position of agreeing and praising? Is this becoming trans now?

But above Hainey has done the same thing:

QT: But the thing is, Rick was sold a bill of goods everyone else was sold. To be a young leading man is to be macho and masculine and sexy and handsome and chiseled.

MH: Well, for his generation, that's the epitome of manhood, of male identity. And here Hainey is agreeing and rephrasing Tarantino. He is not the journalist asking questions that can be labeled "interrogative" forcing their replies into the Binary Discourse. This interview is free association. That makes it different.

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LD: As I'm thinking about it, I've had these relationships in the industry too. You need your support system. You need that guy you can sit there and watch TV with and not say a fucking word with for five hours. You need to know somebody is "there." When we were doing the movie, my relationship with Brad clicked. It was very early on where he improvised a line and it changed everything. In the scene, as it was written, I'm coming to set hungover and I am basically getting my fate handed to me, discovering what my future is going to be in this industry. And I'm really down. And in the scene, Brad ad-libs. He just comes out with this line: He looks at me and says, "Hey you're Rick fucking Dalton. Don't you forget that."

I find this use of another guy to just be there very like the guy who wants the woman - eye candy type? - to just be there, chilling. This is exactly a description of rapprochement from psychoanalysis telling about that early pre specking stage of development when the young child plays in the room where the mother is. Mother does not have to be interacting with her child, she just has to be there. If she gets up and goes to check the oven the spell is broken and the child follows her rather than continue playing. Mother's presence is a necessary part of this tiny world the child requires to play creatively. Mahler's work on Separation and Individuation. clearly Leo has not completed this stage and the fact that he talks about it means that he wants to understand it.

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They are talking together about how the movie industry is changing now. That we are in a moment in time where it is shifting just as it did in 1969. And yes it is. I have felt it for a long time.

BP:  What I always loved about going to a cinema was letting something slowly unfold, and to luxuriate in that story and watch and see where it goes. I'm curious to see if that whole form of movie watching is just out the window with the younger generations. I don't think so completely. 

Walter Benjamin has written beautifully on this understanding. Time is slower. There is time for contemplation, for memory. Today's young people are mostly ADD - medicated or not - and they want FAST. They want to be entertained, amused. They are not looking for contemplation, associations with their memories or connecting dots with other films. 

The classic BP must read

QT: It requires the right kind of movie - one that hits the right kind of nerve where it becomes a conversation.  "Get Out" achieved that. Everyone was talking about it, and the whole metaphor of the Sunken Place was something everyone started to use. It sparked genuine conversation. It used to be movies were the pop-culture conversation and it was much rarer for a TV show to break into that place. But now that's where it is.

For me in the early 1960's while teaching in an elementary school the topic in the teachers's room was always TV and rarely movies. I dont think these three know that.

Leo goes on to say that there is always that chance to do something really fine with your part. Yes there are those wonderful moments when a mediocre film comes alive when that great moment comes. Who can ever forget James Dean in Giant when his oil well hits and he is telling the group all covered in oil and happiness. It was a rare moment then in those times and we all felt it. The same is true in that moment in Thelma and Louise when Brad is caught and being dragged away and shouting to Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon. It was a WOW moment and I just knew, sitting in Singapore watching it, that Brad was going to be the new big star. It was his time to take a small part and make it great.

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QT:  Then you ask, "How does the Manson Family fit in?" Well, that's the trick. And that is, actually, how it is supposed to work. "How does this rancidness figure into everything?" And I want the audience asking that question, and I hope that's one of the things that helps lead you to the theater. It's like we've got a perfectly good body and then we take a syringe and inject it with a deadly virus. 

FLEETING MOMENTS

MH: One of the crazy facts about Manson:He was not an outsider in Hollywood. He crosseed paths with many famous people in town. Like Brian Wilson. Or like doris Day's son, Terry Melcher, the record producer. you guys have lived in this town a long time.what six degrees of weirdness do you have?

BP: I remember back in the early days I hung out with Brandon Lee.....We went out one night and everyone else had peeled off, and we ended up back at his place and it was like six in the morning. A real, you know, drunk and stony night, and he proceeded that night to tell me how he thought he was going to die young like his dad. And I just chalked it up to, you know, stony 6:00 A.M. talk. Then he got The Crow next year.

LD: I have one. One of the most ominous and sad ones. I grew up revering River Phoenix as the great actor of my generation, and all I ever wanted was to have just an opportunity to shake his hand. And one night, at a party in Silver Lake, I saw him walk up a flight of stairs. It was almost like something you would see in Vertigo, because I saw there was something in his face, and I'd never met him - always wanted to meet him, always wanted to just have an encounter with him  - and he was walking toward me and I kind of froze. And then the crowd got in my way, and I looked back and he was gone.  I walked back up the stairs and back down, and I was like, "Where did he go?" And he was ...on his way to the Viper Room.  It was almost as if - I don't know how to describe it, but it's this existential thing where I felt like ...he disappeared in front of my very eyes, and the tragedy that I felt afterward of having lost this great influence for me and all of my friends. The actor we all talked about. Just to be able to have that, always wanting to just - and I remember extending my hand out, and then ...Two people came in front and then I looked back, and then he wasn't there.

BP: I'll tell you one of the greatest moments  I've had in this town: getting to spend two days with Burt Reynolds on this film. 

QT: Yeah.

LD: Yeah.

MH: He was originally cast to play George Spahn, correct?

QT Yeah. The last performance Burt Reynolds gave was when he came down and did a rehearsal day for that sequence, and then the script reading. And that was really amazing.

BP: It was a fucking pleasure.

QT: I found out from three different people that the last thing he did just before he died was run lines with his assistant. Then he went to the bathroom, and that's when he had his heart attack.

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Did anyone notice that all these "moments" were about other men? 

Tarantino is an original and accomplished writer and director of unique films. Leo and Brad have been the objects of desire for many women. Yet none of these three have ever been able to sustain a mature emotional relationship with a mature emotional woman, have they. Brad comes close with Joli but they have a public breakdown on an airplane! Over the eldest son's public argument with his adopted father. so Maddox and Brad go at it and it seems Brad is abusive. This is a very normal occurrence between teen sons and fathers. The old Oedipal who owns the mother, the son or the father? Evidently that was never addressed in the family dynamics. Why? IDK. 

THE COUNSELOR - REVIEW

The Counselor Poster

The first scene shows a biker speeding and we see the road sign Juarez. El Paso is 2 1/2 miles away. None of the reviewers have noticed this resonance, where now thousands of young girls and women's bodies have been found in the surrounding desert. Very young girls come from villages all over Mexico to work in the factories of Juarez and then disappear. Thousands of their unidentified bodies are found decomposed in the desert. It is guessed that many are sold into sex slavery and transported across the border to the US and many are used in Snuff Films while others - well - who knows what terrible lives they lead if alive. All this is conveyed in less than a minute before the scene changes.

But you have to have the political consciousness to know the horror of the dead girls and women of Juarez and their connection to the drug cartel and capitalism, if you are to pick up on the truth of this image of the road sign.

The following scene shows illusion curtains billowing in the breeze as the camera moves to two bodies under the sheets moving slowly against each other, waking up and talking lovingly, intimately to each other. The resonances are multiple. 

Louise Bourgeois - Hamlet and Ophelia

Robert Mapplethorpe

OR

Christo - Wrapped Trees

Rodin The Kiss Wrapped in 1 Mile of Twine by Cornelia Parker

In her review Manohla Dargis of The New York Times remarked on the resonance with Egyptian Mummies

Full circle from JUAREZ to DEATH

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We are abruptly brought under the sheets to be right inside with them watching and unnoticed. 

This is Freud's PRIMAL SCENE. 

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We watch two people obviously intimate and in love experiencing erotic sex without pornographic details, and filmed without a hint of any cliches. We see the difference between performed sex and sex experienced in the eroticism of love. 

The following scenes have been detailed at wiki and in various reviews, most of which say it is a movie about a drug deal gone bad, highlighting individual performances, and the usual complaint about McCarthy's dialogue which they cannot understand. 

The dialogue functions as the chorus in a Greek play - or Shakespeare -  spoken by individuals in prophetic language  that resonates into the future and the past in precession. This is the essence of non-linearity, non progression, non historical but in going forward and backward, bathing the past and the future in clairvoyant light, we are exposed to Nietzche's The Eternal Return and Zarathustra's terrible recognition of it, the spiraling circularity of time.

The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion. - Walter Benjamin: Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

This film was made for the educationally literate adult with a political consciousness to match McCarthy's when it can. Another work of art by McCarthy on the evil of the Western World; the greed and evil of the North American viciousness and the devastation of capitalism lying at the heart of the world and the planet and this film. The doom we all face that is irreversible.

Critique is concerned with the truth content of a work of art, the commentary with its subject matter. The relationship between the two is determined by that basic law of literature according to which the work's truth content is the more relevant the more inconspicuously and intimately it is bound up with its subject matter. Walter Benjamin:Illuminations p.4

The counselor goes to Amsterdam to choose a diamond for an engagement ring for Laura. He does not go to a Tiffany's, with or without her, to buy the ring retail. He goes to Amsterdam, the center of the DeBeers Diamond Cartel, to a connoisseur of fine diamonds where he can peruse numbers of stones unset to make his choice guided by an expert. DeBeers is the monopolistic cartel of all the diamonds in the world, overseeing their mining to their wholesale distribution and marketing. The aura of a fine diamond to be given to a woman carries the "floating sign" of forever love, seduction, wealth, cherishing, the romantic dream DeBeers has engraved on every woman's heart. The DeBeers diamond cartel is  vicious and total, the most successful and entrenched and the oldest. Slaves who labor in the mud, often drowning in it when they slip, subjecting themselves to ruthless enemas at the end of each working day and invasive inspections, provide women with these glorious gems of forever love. The counselor is not even aware of this. He is a criminal lawyer in El Paso who springs on technicalities, the drug cartel clients sent to him for lucrative fees. 

The dirty secret of the drug cartel is that it is an incredible, huge industry for employment. The drivers, the ones who restore the truck containing the cocaine, the ones who clean the blood out of it from the shooting, the businesses that enable it, the bars and night clubs that wash the money, employing millions all over South America to deliver the drugs to the US where the prices are high and the demand is great. The cartel is so entrenched and irreversible that no one wants to imagine what would happen were it to collapse. No, it must continue.

In Philadelphia if you want an excellent criminal lawyer you go to one who works for the Mafia. One who knows the judges, one who takes you before a Mafia judge. All is complicity not justice. 

The Law is in the Order of Production. The Law of the drug cartel is in the Symbolic Order: Vengence. When the complications of the drug deal the counselor is entering into for the first time go sour, his accomplices are murdered, Laura is kidnapped in Juarez. If you know Juarez and its horrors you know what will happen to her to cement the counselor in his place in the hierarchy of the cartel. And we see her dead body dumped into a refuse heap by a machine. He has been warned but Cassandra and Tiresias are never listened to. They are doomed to be ignored, these prophets of the future, to which Cormac McCarthy belongs.

The counselor goes to cultured and aesthetically sophisticated men - a lawyer and a judge? - who live surrounded by exquisite art which never guarantees ethical integrity as we know from the Nazis. They also are complicit professionally with the cartel in Juarez and Texas. They cannot help and he is told by the judge that his choices were made long ago and the present consequences are unfolding according to fate and destiny. 

The bartender who wakes him tells him that without love there is nothing. He enters a protest being filmed of women and men holding posters of lost/dead girls and women, crying and chanting for some kind of  justice for their loved ones. The only justice being served is that of the drug/sex cartel criminals being sprung by expensive criminal lawyers. 

When you die your world no longer exists, he is told. In his room he will be given the CD of Laura's Snuff Film, and his world will no longer exist. 

Cameron Diaz is a marvel in this film. She identifies with her wild/tame pet cheetas, the upper lip of her mouth lifting in silent snarls, cutting her eyes in contempt at others, then saying she will go to Hong Kong. Taking the stolen money from the brutal high tech murder of Westray. Of her plans, "Diamonds, I think. They are small and transportable." We already know she knows much about their value when she has analyzed Laura's ring. And so the drug cartel money recirculates back into the diamond cartel inventory to complete the circle.


The Counselor is a film that is the world. As Paul Virilio says at the end of his Speed and Politics, "The world is run by thugs." 

The governments of the world are complicit with the cartels of the world and McCarthy has in yet another work of art shown us another facet of this and its consequences. All his work is of the same theme. It is irreversible and totalizing. 

And the rot of it all is greed - CAPITALISM. 

Review: KILLING THEM SOFTLY

KILLING THEM SOFTLY lasted just one week at the discount theatre in Brad Pitt's home town Springfield, Missouri. This is absolute proof of its exceptional excellence.

This is a perfect film. It is relentless without a shred of seductive illusion, illusionary seduction in it. There are no throwaway laugh lines either. It is a completely post modern look at our world. Ayn Rand would have loved it. Pitt's fingerprints are all over it, and he is so fine in it, but then so is everyone else.  The violence is viewed in slow motion, a choreographed dance of shattering glass, bullets and blood, and bodies. No vicarious testosterone release at all. It is Tarantino,  pared down, without the charm.

This movie is NOT an entertainment. It is a noir that is more than a noir film. Uncomfortable.

Pitt comes on the scene to handle an inside job of a stick up at the local mafia poker game by the manager of it. He had been beaten to teach him a lesson. But then another one gets the idea to copy cat it. Pitt decides the one who originated the first one has to die although he didn't do it. And then he says the crucial line, "It doesn't matter if he did it or didn't do it. What matters is that he appears to have done it." (And the foundation of our so called justice system comes crumbling down.)  And there we have it. In Simulated Reality that's all that is required. Pitt is correct. People must take responsibility for their actions and for the following consequences. He has been called in by the mafia suit guy who welshes on the idea of killing anyone, just beat them up. Pitt maintains he must die as well as the ones who did the second hold up. He is the only one who seems capable of making a strategic decision and carrying it out. As we switch to the TV and the car radio of the 2008 election we get the same waffling by the candidates with their use of sound bite ready-mades full of empty meaning.

Mr. President Hope and Change

For those who have a memory when media is trying 24/7 to erase it from your heads, the 2008 election took in the derivatives's crash. If you don't understand this here is an explanation and review of the movie Margin Call HERE.

The campaign of 2008 ran on a FANTASY of Hope, Change, Unification, Community, a united America and a myriad of other idealistic ready-mades Americans have all grown to love and be familiar with. This is propaganda 101, Appeal to the Idols of the Marketplace,  so warned against by that sage in the 1500's Francis Bacon.

.... it is a fantasy that is expected to be maintained. And as 

we have learned from Stalin, the moment appearances are 

ruptured, reality itself collapses: it is not just that one has to 

agree with Stalin all the time, one also has to maintain the 

illusion that free discourse is possible; otherwise the fantasy 

that Stalin has been freely chosen to lead the people, that he 

is the first servant as it were, is destroyed. And the whole 

game comes crumbling down. 

In defense of lost causes; On teaching or, to sir with love …

Posted on February 6, 2013 by Jeremy Fernando 

So while these small town poker players are gambling and having their money stolen the premier investment bankers in New York City have been gambling with their OWN AND OTHERS' assets and have vanished this money, threatening the collapse of the dollar and with it the US government. The US government interrupts the campaign and the opposing candidates go to DC to rubber stamp the transfusion of money - and we are talking trillions - to these defunct gamblers at the top of the food chain. And middle and small town America were looted to do it. Interesting parallel metaphor eh, as it cuts in and out of the ongoing shabby story of squalor.

The mafia suit accuses Pitt at the end of a disgusting cynicism. While watching Obama's speech on the unification of all colors, all peoples, rich and poor on the TV Pitt's character replies with his comment about our revered Thomas Jefferson, who sat and drank his wine while he coined all these lovely words of freedom for all that others died defending, fucked his slave and allowed his children to grow up in slavery. And his final retort on the "unification of this country" he says we are all on our own,  that America is not a country, it's a business. 

The Reality of the home of the free and the brave has come crumbling down.  It's no wonder this movie has made so many so uncomfortable that they couldn't review it properly nor give it the box office it deserves. No matter, it will become a forever classic, and Pitt probably wants that anyway. 

Don't see it unless you are going to be on high alert the whole time. 

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On TRICKLE-DOWN THEORY: Things trickle-down but not money. Just false idealism ready-made sound- bites.

For an incredible review of Killing Them Softly go to darren's prize winning blog in Dublin: http://them0vieblog.com/2012/09/21/non-review-review-killing-them-softly/

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.
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