Mannequins

What was the last good movie you saw? Did the actors deliver a stellar performance, or was it just more of the same old routine? Most movies are designed to sell an idea of life and how it should be lived, to convince you that certain behaviours and attitudes are proper and necessary. They are big-budget productions full of bright lights and loud noises, and they keep you from thinking critically. We want to be entertained, after all, to forget about the drama and struggle of life, working for small money and just about paying bills. War, for example, is promoted extensively in the movie theatres, and the hero always looks like you. Some ethnic group is demonised, and others exemplified. Want to sell an idea to the masses? Produce a movie and hire well-known and trusted faces to lead the cast. Doesn't matter if they can't act, it's not about that.

Product placement is everywhere in these excuses for art and creativity. The Truman Show did a great job of satirising this, and, of course, attempted to show us the whole charade of life. Some noticed, and then just got on with whatever they were doing before. Ironically enough, in the lead role, we had someone who could, in fact, act. That's not par for the course, though. A-list celebs who couldn't perform if their life depended on it act out the same shallow character they always do. Vince Vaughan, Robert De Niro, Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, Julia Roberts, et al, what a talentless bunch. Mannequins all.

Maybe that's what we expect of them. The audience goes to see them, not the character they are supposed to be playing or the story being told. People don't watch movies to see a stellar portrayal of truth from history or an everyday working-class hero; they go to see their modern-day celebrity. After all, these are the ones we worship, right? We idolise these real-life fictions and fail to live a life of any purpose ourselves. We become weak carbon copies of paper-thin people. Asleep at the wheel, we live to work and be entertained in the hours that should be filled with critical thinking and discussion.

But then again, what corporate government wants people who think? Democracy is dead; you have no say while you worship celebrity and plastic heroes in red ties. Hoodwinked by charlatans, we sleepwalk into our own destruction, led by talentless robots of people keeping us occupied with things that don't matter. Movies prime us for distraction, hatred, bigotry and for the next war to be waged on working-class people with brown skin. It's not a war of religion or of nationality; it's a war waged by the corporate, political, and financial classes against ordinary people like you and me.

There are no good movies, and there are no real actors anymore, just idiots, robots of people, moving mannequins who sell us shit we don't need or want, and do what they're told.

Bought and soul'd, all of us.