Ferris Buller, Lebron James and … Anyone? … Anyone? … Voodoo Economics

There is something afoot when audiences are so wildly split about a phenomenon.  Asking “how come” often turns up some interesting fruit.  There is a recent commercial that has brought up this kind of split feeling – have you seen the new Honda Ferris Bueller’s Day Off Part II commercial?  It was leaked on Youtube a few days ago and already has 10 million hits.  Looks like audiences are still interested in Matthew Broderick’s 1980s comedy icon.  It’s been something like 25 years since Ferris Bueller’s Day Off became an instant John Hughes classic, and this is the nearest thing to a sequel as we are likely to get. (trailer)

  

Only the funny thing is that time has changed.  It is not just that Ferris Bueller is older, but the culture is different.  Culture doesn’t age in any way we understand how biological beings age, it just changes perspective.  And much has changed ideologically from the mid-eighties.  Really, watch any movie from the eighties (John Hughes movies do well here) and you will see a naïve hope, a romantic vision of the world that just feels awkward today in our time of irony, doubt and crisis.  Comedy today must be far more cynical, snarky, self-reflective.  (If you sent an episode of Family Guy back in time to the eighties, no one would understand it, nor would they find the humor.)  In revisiting Bueller without this layer of cynical code, we glimpse a layer of our culture that we try to deny, a layer that reflects back to us an unsettling reality of consumer culture.  We encounter not a Bueller of the past, but a kind of sad replication of a past that no longer clicks.               

But there is another side to Ferris Bueller that begs the question – is he a hero, and why is Mr. Rooney, the principal, the villain?  Or is it really the reverse?  Rooney sure is a square, but that does not make him a villain.  He is just doing his job, and zealously, I might add, in finding out why Ferris has been missing so much school.  Mr. Rooney is just getting a bad rap all along.  He’s just misunderstood.  On the other hand, who can dispute that Bueller really is a self-absorbed slacker who uses his friends, then mocks them and lies to them.  He lies to the whole school and gets them to send him flowers and overtures of sympathy and kindness.  Meanwhile, he revels in his spoiled brat-ness, causes hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage that he never apologizes for it while Cameron, his stuffy-nosed neutered friend, takes the blame.  And Bueller is the hero here?  No danke schoen.

      

In this sequel, we see the same old Bueller – as if he’s stuck in Groundhog Day sans Bill Murray – living the same lie.  Only, I think we can discern the difference now.  As a teen huckster, audiences forgave him for his naïve romanticism.  But now he is older and stripped of this veneer.  And there is that car.  That soccer-mom-esque orange egg of a Honda.  Is this Ferris “this Ferrari is so choice … I recommend you pick one up” Bueller?  Perhaps an Italian sports car would have been too far.  But Ferris is unchanged.  All we have left is a spoiled narcissist of an adult, a movie actor who takes a break from his personal assistants, his lot trailer and goofing around on a set to what … goof around the city.  Only no one is laughing – all we can do is compare this Bueller to the old Bueller, only now he has no friends, whom he has long since alienated, and he doesn’t have all of suburban Chicago to send him flowers.  He’s just a lonely husk of a huckster.

This trope we now find unappealing because it is too directly selfish.  It is self-serving hedonism in this uninhibited way that is now not just a day off, but a kind of reckless and shallow irresponsibility.  This is a trope that is pretty common today, and there are a couple of other popularly distasteful happenings the last couple of years that show this.  One is Rebecca Black.  Another is Lebron James.

            

The outpouring of vitriol for Black’s “Friday” presages the hatred of Bueller.  Here we have a wealthy spoiled child making a home video with hired professionals.  She gets to sing about friends and parties and easy living.  It mirrors the Buellereque self indulgence that worked in the eighties, but does not today.  It is not coded enough.  This is the move by Slavoj Žižek on consumerism today – we have this injunction to consume, drink, enjoy, buy – everywhere we turn.  We are so overloaded with this system that we have to have internal breaks with which we filter this kind of vertiginous fall into mindless consumption like a self-absorbed id machine.  We derive little islands of restriction – diets, religion, meditation, tai chi, minimalism – as a ideological bulwark to slow future shock.  The “day off” dickishness must now be mitigated with other excuses, other breaks to the system.  (One of these breaks is cynicism – which is what Katy Perry tried to do by injecting a snarky and self-deprecating turn with her “Last Friday Night” video, which included Black.  In a cultural sense, this was a life line to Black in an attempt to validate her.  The life saver in this case is indulging irony and crisis as breaks.)

         

It is a break of flows that Lebron does not have.  When he took his talents to South Beach, Lebron communicated to us that he was a quitter, that he did not have the heart and the killer instinct to win in Cleveland.  He thumbed his nose at his home state, a blue collar industrial small market, and forsaked it for hardbodies, speedboats and mojitos.  Lebron, God’s gift to basketball, a totally amazing athlete, culturally reflected the worst of consumer society back to us – a consumer society best exemplified by Vegas, Miami, and other postmodern playgrounds of Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island.  It is a direct, self-indulgent move without heart, love, dedication, or hard work that are our best resistance to mass culture.  In a sense, he sacrifices himself to the idea of himself as a consumer product – to the endorsements, to the voodoo economics, to the legend that was written for him before he even sported an NBA uniform at the age of 18.  He never had to cow before a great coach, or dedicate himself to a program like he would have in college.  No, he bought into the me-first order of things, a sensibility that the business finds marketable and savvy.  And everyone in his entourage kissed “King James’s” ass. 

And the thing about it that continues to stir is that Lebron doesn’t get it.  He just doesn’t understand that he is not “playing the role of the villain.”  No, he is a villain.  It is not something that he is choosing to do.  Villainy just is or is not – it is not an act.  It is simply Lebron’s massive ego delusion that bears the hallmark of villainy.  It is unconsciousness that is villainous.  An unconsciousness that is, in the end, mindless market-driven consumerism.  It’s so “Ferris Bueller.”  It’s such a “day off” for a guy whose whole life is a day off.  It’s so “Friday.”  So it’s little wonder that when people now say, “I’m taking my talents to South Beach” they mean it as an idiom meaning “Excuse me, I’m going to go pleasure myself.”  It’s one tool we have to discern bad taste.  When you see that Bueller commercial during the Super Bowl, a towering monument of the military-industrial machine, think of Bueller picking up that phone, scrambling his brain to conjure a way out of “work” and saying, “I’ve decided that I’m taking my talents to South Beach.”

 

The Jesus Business

In Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will be Blood, Daniel Plainview is a California oil wildcatter who aligns himself with a fundamentalist family and their young preacher son named Eli Sunday.  Daniel wants their oil-rich land, and Eli wants Daniel’s fortune to help build a church.  Both believe in the value of hard work, expansion, and progress.  Their uneasy alliance is united in their titanic dreams of expansion and exploitation.  The film is an excellent demonstration of the interplay and discourse between two bastions of American Modernism – frontier technology and frontier revivalism.  The both are constructed with the American Protestant fury for work.

As “South Park’s” Cartman says as he is trying to promote his Christian Rock band in order to break through to the mainstream record industry, “You don’t know anything about Christianity, I know enough to exploit it.”  Such is the stuff of fundamentalism.  It is not religious, but  “religoid” – speaking the words, but not the music of scripture – perpetuating at once a failure of religion and a failure to provide an alternative to the malaise of the modern.   This is a very American phenomenon.  While some Christians on the right repeat that the real spirit of Christmas is not about gifts and products, they end up peddling Jesus in the fashion of a product.  It is a product of religious exploitation, peddling Jesus as it would on a business model, restlessly searching for new markets, new methodologies, new advertizement, new subscriptions to its business model, where the “secular society” is a competitive, yet potential, market.

                               

Max Weber wrote his astonishing essay The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism in 1905.  Where Marx proposed that God was created out of the conditions of estranged labor, Weber reversed course writing that the Modernist aspirations of Protestantism – individual salvation, notions of duty and call, guilt and self-denial – found their expression in a new work ethic where labor emerged from a method of inner-worldy asceticism.  Good labors indicated salvation in this sense.  The Puritan refrain went, “Whoever does not work, does not eat.”  Labor, the payment of debt, and insuring the future of the descendents were basic duties morally sanctified as sacred duties of participating in the market. 

The pure monolithic notion of God also translated to the monolithic laws of the market.  It was itself the model of mathematical perfection, a divine activity guided by Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” These are God’s laws.  Or, so it was thought in some banalizing, mechanized, anaesthetic way.  The market was not just amoral, but was the amalgam of reified sacred hopes for individual salvation.  One submitted to the rules of the market, and the market became an ersatz god.  With these doctrines and roles so aligned, it made it difficult to separate capitalism from Protestantism.  They fed each other.  And this link is ever greater in fundamentalist expressions. Today, some on the right even claim that Jesus was a capitalist himself!

The fundamentalist movement has its roots in business.  As a phenomenon in American theology, fundamentalism it has its roots in a 1910’s revival by conservative theologians as a response to modernization and liberal theology.  A multiple-volume anthology, The Fundamentals, lays out a reassertion of dogmatic beliefs in biblical literalism, and the need for literalism to defend the faith from any notion of plurality.  Commissioned by two brothers, Milton and Lyman Stewart, who, like There Will Be Blood’s Daniel Plainview, made a killing in California Oil, the effort was based on a business model to form an equally marketable tool.  

But despite this hardened ideological crust and promise of a comforting and immutable doctrinaire moral order, American fundamentalism shows a great need to adapt and spread.  Like capitalism, it needs to spread to new markets and new consumers, but it maintains the purity of its salvific model and the optimism of its progress.  As an ideology, it changes tactics, adopts new language and technologies.  What American fundamentalism has done is link itself to trade, to the fundamentalists of the free market.  And it made a product out of its ideology – selling an idea in a consumer-driven and service-oriented market.  This is true not just with the marketing of prosperity gospel, or the Willie Loman-style parareligious men’s clubs for salesmen looking to put a thick steak on the table out of their salvific duty, but the simple fact that Jesus is big business, from Kirk Cameron movies to the Creation Museum and Holy Land amusement park.  From Tim Tebow products to “Veggie Tales”.  And because it’s Jesus, it takes the sting out of any nagging notions of capital exploitation.

               

Fundamentalism is then the highest ally of capitalism.  It is succeeds only in making a schmaltzy, maudlin, hollow representation of authentic religious sensibility, as the young preacher Eli Sunday from There Will Be Blood.   But this false, augmented circus of region is distinctly a product of a telecommunications age, an age of commodities.  Jesus has become McJesus in our time.  That is to say, fundamentalism is already a hyperreal manufacture of itself, itself already a cliché, already a fast food franchise, an imitation of religion, an overdone, oversold product of a consumer-driven age.  Fundamentalism is parasitically inextricable from American capitalism, as is demonstrated in its uneasy formation in alliance with the neo-conservative movement.  The fundamentalists want nothing more than security and an opportunity to spread its message to a globalizing parareligious ideology.  The neo-cons wanted a faithful base and unifying myths with which to ground global capitalism.  (Alliances that we are potentially seeing fall apart along with the fractured Republican Party?) 

  

The Stewart brothers had a winning idea, and capitalized on a winning market.  From a business perspective, fundamentalism has been booming as much as oil has been drinking everyone’s milkshake.  Fundamentalism, as a mutant twin to capitalism, preys on consumers with an incessant voice.  But it only succeeds in obfuscating how we perceive the world.   It turns out that fundamentalism is protesting at the wrong rally under the Tea Party banner, unable to extract itself from the ties that bind it.  It senses discomfort in the world, knows something is afoot, but cannot extract itself from its old debts. 

To follow Chris Hedges’s book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, we really have to stop calling this religion.   It is far from what religion is supposed to be, and is itself a blasphemy.  Religion must not be monopolized by the right in this country.  And it is the duty of liberal theology and the public to call things by their rightful name: fascism.

Surplus: Why there is no bright and glorious techno-future

Sometimes I ask people, “Doesn’t the year 2000 still seem like the future?” People old enough seem to get it, answering with a mixture of nods, smirks and sighs. Furturists in the later half of the 20th century tended to think of the millennium as a watershed of technology and society. We thought there would be flying cars. Something like Back to the Future Part II where shoes laced themselves and homes were totally automated. It seemed doable, convenient, inevitable. But there is something wrong with the vision. Something critically wrong. In fact, if you look at it, that technological utopia may be precisely what is wrong with itself.

The problem with technology is perhaps best exemplified by one of the most futuristic homes on the planet, Bill and Melinda Gates’ 66,000 square foot mansion in Washington. Built in 21st century “Pacific Lodge” style next to a lake, the house is the cutting edge in design and it is a totally intelligent house run by a sophisticated computer system. The floors are pressure sensitive and know where guests are based on their specific weight. The house senses where people are, allowing lighting to automatically follow the path of individuals, which can be controlled by touchpads placed throughout. Hidden speakers allow music to follow people throughout the house. Visitors are given microchips and scanned upon entry so the house can change each rooms temperature according to desired specifications. The 17 by 60 foot swimming pool has underwater music systems. There is also a 2,100 square foot library, 92 foot long staircase and a 20 seat art deco home theater with popcorn machine. It’s as close to the Galaxy Class U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D you can get to today in its sophistication. No word yet on if he’s installing a holodeck. But if anyone could, it is Bill Gates, who is worth well over 50 billion dollars.

But this Star Trek future, this optimism in technology, comes at a price. It is doable for the world’s richest man. But where is this technology for everyone else today? The vision is critically flawed because civilization relies on institutional poverty as a precondition. Today we are having record poverty. Record unemployment. 50 million below the poverty line in the U.S. alone. Another 50 million or so can not afford health insurance. And many who do have insurance find it too expensive to afford life. In short, it is pretty indecent to have this great glorious vision of the future. It is a hope that is not ours when half the world goes to bed hungry every night. And at this rate, as Ivan Illich envisioned, even the U.S. will be a “third world country” by 2020, with a few mega rich and masses upon masses of the poor. This is the aim of the international corporate and financial consortium. Don’t be fooled. They are not going to “create jobs.” That was never their aim. Their aim to make profit. And profit does not trickle down. It trickles up.

There is a sobering old saying, “past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.” With the money the U.S. military spends in one weekend, the whole world could get access to clean drinking water. It’s just not a great concern. It won’t happen. Think of the wealth – the 400 richest people in the U.S. have over half of the private wealth of the country, and own all the best land. Massive tracts of it. The Wal-Mart family alone could buy several countries. The crippling national debt of Jamaica is somewhere around 18 billion dollars. It’s 18 billion that they are unlikely to ever come up with. No one is rushing for Jamaican economic justice. But mega banks can get bailed out over the weekend.

What would be impressive is not a vision of a technological future that no one can afford, but a way to re-imagine a society that prioritizes sanity to wealth, health of the landbase over profit, health of the community over jobs. And this is why I’m not a techno-utopian. Technology is not neutral. It is an expression of surplus. It tends to be alienating, idealistic, anthropomorphic, a Promethian test of human and biological limits. And I’m not that impressed. Mushrooms have greater complexity. And who cares if you can listen to music under water? I can’t even seem to make sense of my oud.