Send in the clowns

Here's one for the medium-is-the-message file: I was clicking through the trailers on iTunes the other day and noticed one called Silver Circle. Being that I'll watch anything computer-animated, I took a look.

Wow. It's like a right-wing, financial survivalist's Matrix.

Trailers are meant to give you enough of a film to get you interested - to help you see if you're in the audience for the picture. So when in the first seconds you see a character attacked by an army of faceless drones behind shields that read 'Federal Reserve', you know that you're watching something whose target market is waiting for the U.N. black helicopters to touch down.

Go on and you get an especially hoary piece of conspiracy theorizing. It seems that these characters live in a world where currency is supported by governments, rather than quaint things like precious metals (which haven't supported economies since the Bretton Woods Agreements...). "Rebels" have begun minting their own currency which they claim has "value"  and that draws the ire of the Federal Reserve (remember when movies were about mysterious foreign threats? James Bond, anyone? Please?)

Zoe, our spunky, lo-res heroine, is a freedom fighter. Her ultimate foe may be Victor Brant, Chair of the Federal Reserve, but her proximal adversary is Jay, who's investigating an arson and is drawn into a  romantic entanglement (with explosions, the website promises!). They live in 2019, which, with hyper-inflation, sounds a lot like Weimar Germany, and the dollar has lost its position as a lynchpin currency. It's notable that its not predatory banks or industries that are capitalizing on this crisis - it's the our own government.

Yawn. Ron Paul made this up in 2009. Or rather, he gets a ton of credit for what has been talked about in a mess of fringy groups for decades. But when the fringe starts releasing its own animate feature films, you know it's time to start getting active.

We've seen movies as vehicles of allegory and protest before. What's amusing is when the medium of cinema gets put to use clumsily. Really? Silver Circle is lower quality than the animatics you see in bonus features for a major studio release. It is painful to watch a two minute trailer, almost as painful as watching SIMs act. It's implied on a page about the studio that director Pasha Roberts picks lo-tech 'South Park-syle' animations because they give the work counter-culture cred. Don't believe it. This thing looks like one of the (once) popular animated news re-enactments.

But why are they doing this? (Who are they? I'm not there yet - hang on) Let's read a from a post on the Silver Circle Underground Blog:

Science fiction movies often introduce ideas that are later produced by science. After all, science fiction writers spend a lot of time dreaming up technological gadgets for their heroes and villains to use. In the Terminator movie series, cyborg assassins were equipped with built-in technology that allowed them to see in infrared. In addition, their eyes could access software that provided a heads-up display full of useful information about objects and individuals in their field of vision.

To me, this looks like a classic case of if-you-can't-beat-'em, join'em. For years, citizens on the right have decried the liberal bias of the entertainment/media complex. But with the success of FoxNews, it appears that a wholesale effort is afoot to craft an alternate universe. The story quoted above goes on to describe how the government is 'compiling untold volumes of unconstitutional data' on citizens. Don't bother asking about evidence, there is none. In the real world, there are plenty of allegations - supported by data - of corporations collecting consumers' private data and selling it or turning it over to the government, but that's not exactly the same thing, really. It seems that every sin that could be committed in the Silver Circle universe must be committed by the government, and one assumes that power is the motive. Corporations, motivated by the much more fungible concept of profit, seem to be nowhere to be seen...

Hmmm...wonder why that is?

No really. We were just treated to a whole year of politics based on the idea that a lie told loudly and often becomes truth. Now see a new kind of lie - one predicated on omission, one that claims that everything wrong with the country today comes from the doings of its government. With citizen ire directed toward the government - an institution that carries out the will of its people - no one has time to care about the greed and indifference of corporate entities whose greatest concern appears to be that there is too much money out there - too much for them to control it all.

Lately my work has led me from a once-sunny and mildly postmodern/ironic attitude toward codes to a much more sinister place lately. We are hearing all sorts of weird newsspeak like 'liberty filmmaking' and 'truth language'.  I have become interested in the various cyphers and verbal secret handshakes or hate groups and anti-government organizations, most of whom operate under the delusion that they are the ones with real freedom and a frightening responsibility to save the rest of us.

We could ignore this. That may be the best strategy. But I am afraid that the people who think that it's a good idea to oppose our government through violence and fear-mongering propaganda rather than through the political process will keep up their rhetoric and some people may start believing them. Critical thinking skills are not something we can count on in the electorate these days, and Silver Circle looks like the latest attempt to take advantage of that situation. We are living through the consequences of unchecked access to guns and ammunition no, something we should have had the political will (if not the moral responsibility) to oppose. I have enough trouble letting a bad movie ruin my day, let alone my country.