James Bond's Tears and Other Nocturnal Emissions

[digitaldiscipline]

It's been a long time (five years? perhaps) since I've watched Apocalypse Now, so my shot-by-shot recollection of the "Charlie don't surf!" scene is hazy, but I don't think it contains enough homoerotic content to warrant a half-hour documentary. It went into a lengthy discussion of how carefully crafted camera-work on the part of Coppolla was pretty obviously (once you looked, otherwise it was subtle enough to be lost in the howl of the movie) trying to portray a homosexual subtext.

Said documentary doesn't exist, you see. It was simply channel fodder on my intra-cranial broadcast network last night, though it did have The History Channel's logo in the corner and high production values throughout. I may watch the scene again to see how much of it was actually there, and how much of the "footage" was spontaneously conjured. I think it's about 40/60, but we'll see.

What followed was, for lack of a better term, a documentary on the erosion of civil liberties and the rise of the Neocons.

The transition was going from the beach in 'Nam to a lagoon, teeming with mines and torpedoes, being hotly contested off the coast of Iwo Jima (or some similar island, time frame uncertain). Talk of the unstable munitions, and how soldiers would rush for the bottled water and Hi-C analog when supply drops would arrive, packaged in and around mines and mortar shells. I was, oddly, one of the soldiers there, and then transitioned through to Vietnam again, and some female folk singer was putting out a rendition of some famous anti-war ballad, but the words were different, more pro-war, and I couldn't talk to her to stop it.

In a voice-over, the narrator explained how a lot of soldiers' concerns were ignored, both within the chain of command, and in the public eye afterwards, and then the show shifted again, to show racism and brutality at the institutional level, including a chilling interview with a white police officer who had participated in beating a black man to death, including some grisly footage.

Officer: "Well, I saw those two [black] guys beating on the other one, and I just. . . you know. . . I wanted to do it. I didn't want to miss it. I felt foolish holding that thing [a primitive stone age hammer/axe], but. . . I did it." His voice was accompanying 60's-era footage of two black men kicking and punching a third, who was curled in a fetal position on the ground on an enclosed brick patio, with lush greenery growing over the six- or eight-foot chain link fences, before the officer (resembling Jeff Foxworthy, but less rangy) peers around the corner of a garage, and then approaches, the implement in his hand, to join in the beating. The victim never looked at the cameraman, but turned towards the new assailant, and can clearly be seen to be screaming, "Why?" The footage is replaced with a shot of the cop today, a retirement-age man in a prison jumpsuit.

"I was acquitted, you know. I'm here today for something else."

The narrator talked about the assassination of Martin Luther King, showing a still photo of him standing tall, his dark suit immaculate, in the middle of a crowd of people listening to him speak, and his "I have a dream" speech is heard softly in the background. The film shifts to a white man with impeccable hair in a dark jacket and white shirt, wearing Ray-Bans and standing in the Lincoln Memorial at sunset. It looks like either Pierce Brosnan or JFK Jr, and there are tears running down the line of his jaw from beneath his sunglasses.

Cut to commercial.

[ETA] Coming back, we were again shown footage of the beating, and how it recieved almost no coverage in the national media. "People were saying, 'How could this happen?' and they couldn't find any answers," one expert who was interviewed said. "That was when some people began to realize that we weren't one country anymore. There were two Americas, and most of us didn't live in the other one."

Voice-Over: The realization galvanized people to action, but without any ability to grasp the problem, change was far from certain.


There was more, but it's dissolved in the face of the day. Sobering, to say the least. I think the contributing factors were that flash animation I posted the link to last night, and a conversation on thewronghands' journal, combined with the uncertainty imbued by an ominous memo sent out by upper upper management yesterday. The alarm caused by lattermost has been somewhat blunted by reassurances by my boss that our team has nothing to worry about, and we're guaranteed to be here at least through March.

Comments

[ivy]

Sorry to be the voice of disturbing. Let me know if I need to send a mariachi band to serve as counterbalance. [rueful grin]

[etcet.livejournal.com]

Nah. If the world wasn't fucked, there wouldn't be all the conspiracy crap to give credence. You tend to incite intelligent conversation with your posts; that's non-trivial.

Besides, between you and trystbat, I get to be the reactionary right-hand side of a lot of arguments (or at least the devil's advocate), rather than being the "whiny liberal." *chuckle*