WHO HERE LIKES VICE?
For those of you who are unfamiliar with who they are, they are these guys who’ve managed to educate young folk on world events by portraying their journalistic endeavors in a more attractive way: from teaching us about drugs like the “get-anyone-to-do-what-you-say” drug, “Scopolamine”, to “sneaking” inside North Korea.
Think “Hipster Christiane Amanpour”.
Anyway, they used to make these awesome documentaries for free on Youtube; but now that they’ve got their own show coming to HBO, there’s been some of what formerly loyal Vice viewers dub, “VIP spotlighting”
For instance, “this one totally famous” gay blogger guy talking about this elite blogger party he went to with his other elite gay friends, reminding everyone how famous he was with this story about “this guy who recognized me there…and my blog…and who followed me around all night…and he was complimenting me…. but it was in a weird way… and he totally was acting like Jeffrey Dahmer…”
This story is clearly important because it serves the following purposes: 1. The egotistical self aggrandizing acknowledgment of his fame through storytelling (obviously he’s super famous if people recognize him at a fkkn blogger party), and 2. Well… that’s it.
Anyway, the point is not that guy, but that Vice viewers say they want to be educated; but when they get it via an amazing pieces like “Unclear Holocaust” or “Police Mortality”, you see comments talking about how highfalutin they’re being. Click to see one or both films:
CONTEXT PLEASE?
As for those two movies? “Out of context” is the context. You probably haven’t heard of them. The way the movie’s done is this: You know how around campaign time, people overtake Youtube, splice up candidate speeches to make them say anything from a real political message to “Call Me Maybe”? Well, think of an amalgamation of 50 apocalypse and 50 cop films juxtaposed together to get across another “certain message”. In the end, it accomplishes a whole new genre of what I’ll call philosofunny for now – it speaks an important truth, but simultaneously has moments of comic relief; it’s not humorous in the “Disaster Movie” slapstick way, but more of a “funny because it’s true in real life” way that a comedian might accomplish on stage.
SO WHAT ARE THEY TRYING TO SAY?
Although the interview wasn’t filled with colloquialisms (as a few pointed out), I still felt it did its job: Helped to “explain” the pieces for those who might accidentally misinterpret them dismissively as respectively “conspiracy theorist” or “the police are coming to get you via martial law” stuff you’ll see strewn over the net.
I’m not saying that’s not true or happening; but there’s this whole “deeper” philosophy behind it.
Note: While “Fap” meme is hilarious, it does not count in the Freudian sense. Unfortunately, masturbation is not a survival skill, nor does it bear womb-fruit.
Anyway, for those who aren’t Freud fans/don’t get the jargon like “eros” or “thanatos” (and don’t want to look it up either), think of the former as “GOOD/love-of-self-in-a-good-way” and the latter as “BAD/Love of self-destruction”. Anyway, concepts of both movies mean to urge us to consider the fact that “we” (on both micro and macro levels) deserve more than this ongoing addiction to self destruction that Hollywood hurls at us and we subsequently regurgitate into our everyday life. Every minor crisis becomes the daily drama until any mildly larger crises become indistinguishable from eachother! It’s like any kind of a deviation from routine spreads panic like a virus.
But you don’t do that, right? Really? Check your Facebook newsfeed status around wintertime. In fact – around my area – you can check today. They’re predicting snow, I believe. Notice anything going on?
Panic on the news, and people doing the same as they flee to the stores to initiate for the “impact” of the “impending” storm. Well it’s afternoon on the day they claimed it was going to snow, and you know what? I’m not sure what’s more annoying: All this “snow” nonsense, the sound of the birds who only chirp when it’s too warm to snow, or the bright sun creeping through my blinds.
You get the picture.
The last time I had a panic attack over that few inches, was to find the nearest exit from the bedroom I was in. Hashtag: Misleading shoe size.
TAKE HOME MESSAGE?
The message isn’t about illuminati or shadow government, but about a subconscious tendency toward auto-annihilation (ie – “I deserve this terrible crap that happens to me and expect more to come”). The words “government” and “police force” are synecdoches (click on that word if you don’t know the definition) you have to look past: We’re all people in the end.
What I mean is that every person’s “thanatos” (feeling like we deserve destruction) becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. On a larger level (lots of individual people in charge), the machines that either govern or “serve and protect” us end up dining on a bullet, taking out the people (individuals) who trusted them. And how do “we the people” respond? Well, we’re down with the “thanatos” too by now! We believe we deserve the destruction that they caused as a result of… you guessed it: Believing they deserved destruction, also.
But, hey! Don’t blame yourselves.
As the piece suggests (and as I showed you above), we’re all born into and propagate it to eachother and into the next generation (if you watch “Unclear Holocaust”, you’ll note a bit where they juxtapose what’s supposed to be a heartwarming scene with Bill Pullman and his daughter, into him handing the phone over to the little girl and giving her the remote, so that all she can hear and see is murder and mayhem and shotguns going off).
Spoiler alert. This is the ending:
But then how will I watch Vice’s new series on HBO? That’s not very nice when they just lent you the limelight…
xoxo
<3~A