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What To Do In Times Like This (Part Two)


Music: Basket Case

See Part One for an introduction to this proposal for a collective eRep movie project called The Hatch. Part One concluded with the observation that the proper focus of The Hatch must be precisely the problem of the true ethical act: what can a (relatively) honest player do in today's conditions?

Here in Part Two we'll explore that question. Cinematically, of course...



The first part of addressing such a question is to ponder whether or not one is living/playing in Evental Times. In a twist on the old Ry Cooder song, the viewer needs to be aske😛 "How much must a poor man stand in such times to live?"

In each episode it will be important to know if there is a potential on the horizon for a radically emancipatory e-movment. Or, conversely, are the characters living/playing/acting in non-Evental Times? The Hatch should provide a whole panoply of "types of (relative) honesty" that are attuned to having the Evental barometer reading out at various settings, of "what to do's" under various conditions.

As a somewhat banal, but realistic example: under certain conditions a player-character might have a willingness to compromise, but not to meddle with statistics.

Under whatever conditions, the repeated theme should be that, in order to act ethically, all of the characters have to violate the Law in one way or another.






In our collective rendering of the abandoned and disappeared players of eRep, of what will be -- at the end of many days -- an epic murder mystery, we should not omit to cinematically mirror the fact that villainy in mass culture has been reduced to two lone survivors of the category of evil. The two "allowable" representatives of the truly antisocial have been reduced to (1) serial killers and (2) terrorists. (Regarding terrorists, they are mainly of the religious persuasion with ethnic overtones. Secular political antagonists like communists and anarchists no longer seem to be available.)

For us screenwriters, this is important to understand because waging a fight against e-crime and e-injustice requires both funding and public opinion. In order to mobilize such resources, our crime-fighters will very likely need to create the illusion, for example, of a serial killer or a mad terrorist on the loose, in order to draw attention to their campaign. So, as film-makers, we need to make good appropriations of such memes.




Further, and this is key: Our hero must never act alone. A basic lesson should be that individual acts are inadequate.





Emblem of the Desert Rats. Unlike the "noble hero" of cowboy Westerns and Miltonic epic poems, a rat is a worthy symbol for literary-artistic resuscitation in these times.


Bansky Rat meets Black Panther. Me likey.




Going beyond the individual hero, towards a collective act that in non-Evental Times can only appear as a conspiracy of otherness, our private detective or committed police officer or poetic-sexy community organizer / teacher or whatever mask we choose to give to the character who initiates the action, acting on her or his own could not fail to echo romanticism, to recapitulate romantic heros and romantic rebels.

We don't need and don't want that devil of a problem; it would be a categorical error to go down that path. Our film cannot and should not be a re-make of Paradise Lost.


In our socialized and collective historical space, our hero must be rebellious, yes -- with no respect for authority, preferably an alcoholic or drug addict engaged in multiple sexual infidelities, along with having an ineradicable and shocking sense of idealism. More James Dean or Dirty Harry than Tom Mix or Jaime Escalante. More Garcia Lorca than Maya Angelou.







But he or she must also meet up with and work with the unlikeliest possible set of comrades and co-conspirators: say..

* a transgendered police officer,
* a pair of very smart but utterly undependable veteran players,
* a slow-witted nepotistic elite favorite who turns out to have a remarkable gift for statistics,
* various young interns, some who are philosophically engaged, some not, and finally
* a quiet and unassuming fixer (like Robert DeNiro in Brazil, but real).

This group of characters should have the feel of a kind of proto-communist cell of conspirators, or a group of eccentrics from a Charles Dickens novel or a Frank Capra film, with some smelly and dilapidated basement office as their secret conspiratorial lair.

With this group of conspirators the film will confirm that old chestnut: that the law itself is the greatest and most daring of all conspiracies. Or, if you like, in Brechtian terms: "What is robbing a bank as compared to the founding of a bank?"

Our heros will be like Dexter: a serial killer who kills killers who have killed without cause and are likely to do so again. They will be the perfect e-cops in the guise of the exact opposite, with a code that is simple and pragmatic: only destroy those who have the authority to order the e-destruction of others.




The fixer in The Hatch's group of eccentric and anti-heroic anti-heroes should have the kind of genius that allows him (or her) to not only solve problems in ingenious ways, but also to displace the sense of mystery and detective interest (the "obvious" genre of the film) onto a fascination with construction and physical or engineering problem solving.

That is to say, the viewer should come away with a sense of the importance of simple handicraft rather than a sense of "awe" for abstract deduction.

When discovered and first invited to join the special/underground investigative unit, this character should be an unemployed programmer or furniture maker who spends hir spare time making miniature copies of philosophers and presenting them as eRep multies (which are sold to the highest bidder on the eRep black market). It will be a parable of the waste of human and intelligence productivity and its displacement onto trivial activities.

This character will be a perfect representative of "useless knowledge" -- the conspirators' intellectual, rather than an expert, and as such effective in proposing actual e-solutions to actual e-problems.




So what will our group do? Will they not be caught up in a tragic viscious circle in which their very resistance contributes to the reproduction of the e-system?

Herein lies the difference between the world of The Hatch and traditional Greek tragedy. So much of standard television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which the hero encounters truth and attains sublime greatness in his fall. Here, in our epic eRep film, the stupendous and stupefying and horrifying otherness of Fate runs in a different way: the system, and not life, just goes on, with no cathartic climax.

This failure to recreate the form of a standard TV series can be implemented, along the lines of one standard storyline technique, as carefully omitting the appearance of any Dickensian benefactor. After 132 hours, the film will never arrive at a final conclusion, not only because we never discover the ultimate culprit, but also because the e-system really is striving only for its own self-reproduction.

This insight will be rendered in one of the (many) final scenes, as one of our group observes Bucharest from a bridge, accompanied by series of flashbacks and glimpses of e-life throughout the New World. What we will portray here will not be an ultimate conclusion, but a kind of proto-Hegelian absolute standpoint of reflexive distance, a withdrawal from direct engagement: the idea being that our various struggles, hopes and defeats are all part of a larger "circle of life" whose true aim is simply its own self-reproduction, or this very circulation itself, which may not have any real "life force" at all, a "circle of life" that is anything but Disneyesque.

It is simple really. From the finite subjective standpoint the goal of e-production is the product, that is, e-objects that will satisfy player's imagined needs. Use-value, from the absolute standpoint of the e-system as a totality, as the satisfaction of indvidual needs is just a necessary means to keep the machinery of e-capitalist (re)production going. That's the circle. And it's a viscious one.

Or as good ol' Gertrude would've put it much more simply, from a "heroic" perspective: "There's no there there."




The Hatch needs to be a whodunit in which the culprit is the e-social totality, the whole e-system, not an individual criminal or group of criminals.

The difficult and essential problem is how are we to render in art the totality of contemporary e-capital? What is so specific about our contemporary e-tragedy? To get at this problem, we need to recall that the Real of the e-capitalist system is abstract; it is the abstract-virtual movement of Capital within the realm of eRepublik. We must mobilize our understanding of the difference between reality, e-reality and the Real, reminding ourselves that reality and e-reality masks the Real.

In other words, there is, in a very real sense, "real abstraction". But we can only allude to the real (and the e-real) in our art because it is too powerful to depict directly.


No deus ex machina

OK. So here is the philosophical summary for our collective film experience:

Out there, byeond the New World, the mad, self-enhancing circuit of capital in its solipsistic path of self-fecundation, reaches its apogee in today's meta-reflexive speculations on futures. No ideological abstraction, the futures market is part of our financial speculator's misperception of social reality but is at the same time real in the precise sense of determining the structure of material social processes: the fate of whole strata of the population, even of whole countries, can be decided by this solipsistic speculative dance of Capital.

This is the systemic violence of the system, which is much more uncanny than any direct pre-capitalist socio-ideological violence. This type of violence is not attributable to individuals and their "evil" intentions. It is purely "objective", systematic and anonymous. A market can be "financially healthy" even when everyday life is palpably in a shambles.

The e-market and the e-real mirror and recapitulate in gross forms this deadly dance of abstractions.

Our film -- as I have outlined it -- will not solve the formal task of how to render, in cinematic narrative, a universe in which abstraction reigns. Its limit will be the limits of psychological realism.

How to break through that? Brecht and Chaplin engaged ridiculous cliches - perhaps that is the method? But I am leaving a deeper dive on that for another day...

There is comedy under foot, however...



The Ending

The problem, then remains: clearly we can provide a properly tragic vision of a meangingless e-life and e-death, redeemed only by hopeless resistance, but the underlying ethical motto of our film must remain something like "Resist, even if you know that in the end you will lose".

If we are to do our job properly, then the concluding scenes of our murder mystery must include an e-death that is nameless: a body in an e-morgue, identified only by a name tag, with a name that is only a ridiculous street/avatar name, like "Turd", and perhaps one that was initially misplaced on another body, an e-murder unaccounted for, a death without ceremony, with no Antigone demanding a burial.

This very anonymity of death will shift the situation from tragedy to comedy, but a comedy that is even harsher that tragedy itself. For tragedy is by definition a tragedy of character, the failure of the hero being grounded in a flaw in his character. And the comic dimension is signaled by the utter arbitrariness of a name: in philosophical terms, why am I that name? In our comedy the name is used for totally arbitrary and external reasons; there is no deep reason for it. And none of the death and destruction is due to character flaws.

If our film collective can deliver a tragedy of a new type, one that is also a comedy that is darker than tragedy, then we will have accomplished something.




After all of that, then our wacky gang of resisters should be seen continuing to resist, their "careers" in ruin and acting against the orders of their superiors, for no particular reasons, just to provide for the presence of a kind of unconditional ethical drive that links the members of the conspiratorial group.

By disposing of the dispositif itself, our heros, in a profoundly Hegelian way, will abandon the critical stance towards reality as the ultimate horizon of possible political thinking. It should be clear by now, both in the e-world and the r-world, that such critical stances have failed to accomplish the fulfillment of their own gesture.

No. If it is to resonate at all, the radicalization of the subjective negative-critical attitude towards e-reality must be a full critical self-negation.

Or to be more precise: it is a speculative surrender of the Self to the Absolute, which is a kind of absolution, or release from engagement (in a Hegelian-dialectical way) that is not an immersion of the subject into the higher unity of an all-encompassing Absolute, but the inscription of the "critical" gap that separates the subject from the social substance it resists into this e-substance itself, as its own antagonism or self-distance.

Anyone well-versed in Dioist metaphysics will see where this is headed.

The hystericized prime mover must embrace a fundamental existential indifference; she must no longer be willing to remain hostage to a second-handed blackmail, she must be ready to give up the very kernel of her e-being, that which means everything to her and accept the "end of the new world", a temporary suspension of the very flow of energy that keeps the e-world running. In order to gain everything, she must be ready to go to the zero-point of losing everything, not entirely dissimilar from how Lenin ignored all "patriotic" worries and cooly stepped back to observe the deadly imperialist dance while laying the foundation for a revolutionary process.

The final lesson, then, of the film needs to be: Only when we fully embrace a tragic pessimism, accepting that there is no future within the existing e-system, can an opening emerge for a radical change to come.


















Roll credits...

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