“Do Not Search” and Netflix Policy

A few years ago, people went to the cinema and then went to eat or have a drink to discuss the movie they had seen. Today the screen mostly moved to the house and discussions took place on social networks. But the film itself is no longer a subject of debate, but rather the way it is viewed, the platform chosen and the audience it is directed towards.

Last weekend, we watched on Netflix, from the cozy living room of the house, Don’t Look Up, the “critical of capitalism” right now, as it once was by Parasite and Joker. We love it. We enjoy this political, social, and cultural satire that mocks the ugliest of current capitalism, represented by animals as hideous as is plausible: political leaders who act as corporate puppets, businessmen who take their greed to achieve genocide, and deniers. Logic and science, vulgar journalists, a society that was managed by mathematical standards until the last second before the end of the world.

Officially, director Adam McKay dived into the disaster film Independence Day + the pessimistic erosion of democracy and this turned out. A very epidemic combination.

In addition to being an excellent actor, we loved the movie because it expressed in pictures and words some of the things we think about the world today. It will be argued, for reasons that are very understandable from a cinematic perspective, that a good film should do the opposite or, at least, ascribe the approximate evaluation which is more “skin-deep” than the artistic: stirring up nuances, suggesting contrasts, tackling the narrative and visual intricacies that make the viewer comfortable.

The latter is exactly what you’re not looking for and doing – at least we – we needed to do. We just wanted our daily stupor, for which we sometimes don’t find words, to be reflected in the Sunday Night (No Football) movie on Netflix.

To enjoy a Sunday Night movie on Netflix, we recommend that fundamentalists in revolution (whether aesthetic or political) first understand the obvious philosophical objections to launching an anti-capitalist savage tank on a hypercapitalist platform, and then bracket them. .

The readings in this sense are multiple and can warm up sensitive pronouns. Because it already:

a) Savage capitalism will not fall for a hundred films or a hundred films that question it.

b) Neoliberalism works ‘best’ when no one is defending it – least of all art and culture. Rather, it needs to reinforce the dialectical tension within it: a discursive anti-capitalist who acts as an escape valve for a reality that has already been assumed and naturalized.

c) The system needs to create, both in reality and in imagination, monsters (Trump, Bolsonaro, Cast, the heroes of Don’t Look Up) that are so brutal that there is no way – at least from a good idea – outside of rationality – to identify with them, which paves the way The road finally caught up with the least brutal in their gestures, but just as predatory.

d) Netflix is ​​one of the slogans of this “politically incorrect neoliberal,” the progressive branch, let’s say, which opposes the other “politically incorrect neoliberal,” i.e. anti-vaccine, pandemic deniers, etc.

But it turns out that, knowing all this, we would like to see in imagination, lightly, humor and excellent performance, this other thing which is difficult to explain in everyday life: that those who command are not those who really command, not even (or even less) in United State ; that the big media play a major role in the folly of a section of society; That social networking takes care of the rest.

Pleasure is secondary to indignation. It can include doses of masochism and end up being harmless because it all leads to the famous phrase attributed to Frederick Jameson: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

But in the absence of tangible elements that would allow one to dream of changing the course of the global economy, it is a pleasure to shout out world stupidity and mean power with scientist Randall Mindy. It’s just catharsis. So far.