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.

Review:Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises - Darren in Ireland at The M0vie Blog

The M0vie Blog 

I see no point in reproducing perfection so read Darren at his blog www.them0vieblog.com 

There are some things I wish to say about his review. 

Darren's awareness of the poignant absence of The Joker. Not even a throw away reference to him as Darren wishes.

 I agree with Nolan. The absence of The Joker is a void that is "Less Than Nothing" to steal from Zizek's book on Hegel. Nolan has invited Death as a presence in The Dark Knight Rises. The absence of The Joker resonates with the death of Heath Ledger, his irreplaceability, his singularity. Could there be any more beautiful memorial to Ledger than this film that mourns his non-being, depriving it of the focus that was his alone.

Darren has merged Bane and Wayne into an indivisible whole. As Babette Babich reminds us, each opposition includes its opposite. No division. Baudrillard will write an entire book on The Intelligence of Evil, how absolutely necessary evil is, which disappears in Simulated Reality. Ayn Rand tells us what evil is in her fictionalized character of Ellsworth Toohey, the man who would elevate mediocrity until our ability to perceive excellence disappears.  

Darren's recognition of masks, how they act as "floating signs" to affirm what they deny. How Wayne's mask and Bane's mask reflect each other in a mirror darkly. 

Nolan is teaching us our new world of simulation. He is addressing what DeLillo addressed in Cosmopolis, but what Cronenberg was afraid to touch. See here.

As Darren asserts, this is the first film to acknowledge the importance of Occupy, which Cronenberg misreads, thinking "they just want a piece of the pie."

Nolan plays on inversion which Darren recognizes. The mirror.

One discovers the same speculation in Baudrillard's concluding meditation on Borges' story of the 'mirror people', which prompts his suggestion that behind every reflection or representation 'a defeated enemy lies concealed'; a defeated 'singularity', which 'will one day rebel'. (Baudrillard in his The Perfect Crime quoted in Performance Research 1.3 - Richard Gough p.7)

Here begins the great revenge of otherness, of all the forms which subtly or violently deprived of their singularity,; henceforth pose an insoluble problem for the social order, and also for the political and biological orders.  

In those days the world of mirrors and the world of men were not, as they are now, cut off from each other. They were, besides, quite different; neither beings nor colours nor shapes were the same. Both kingdoms, the specular and the human, lived in harmony; you could come and go through mirrors. One night the mirror people invaded the earth. Their power was great, but at the end of bloody warfare the magic arts of the Yellow Emperor prevailed. He repulsed the invaders, imprisoned them in their mirrors, and forced on them the task of repeating, as though in a kind of dream, all the actions of men. He stripped them of their power and of their forms, and reduced them to mere slavish reflections. Nonetheless, a day will come when the magic spell will be shaken off....shapes will begin to stir. Little by little they will differ from us; little by little they will not imitate us. They will break through the barriers of glass or metal and this time will not be defeated. (Borges -T he Book of Imaginary Beings p. 67-8)

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A postscript.

Darren emphasizes the fact that Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises has an ending, breaking the trope of comic hero stories. And ending signals DEATH and Death does not belong to this genre.  Another tribute to Ledger or perhaps Ledger lodged it in Nolan's mind.