anti-globalization - book - 2007 - What Would Jesus Buy?: Fabulous Prayers in the Face of the Shopocalypse

What Would Jesus Buy?: Fabulous Prayers in the Face of the Shopocalypse
Reverend Billy
PublicAffairs
2006
214 pages

Reverend Billy (aka Billy Talen) is the figurehead of an anti-globalization activist group called The Church of Stop Shopping (at some point since 2006 it has been rechristened The Church of Life After Shopping).  The Church is essentially a radical theater troupe with an activist focus on critiquing conspicuous consumption in America via performing a parody of Pentecostal revival meetings in public settings.  The Church of Stop Shopping is one of a number of “culture jamming” activist groups that emerged from the mid-90s to the early 2000s to combine media theory, performance, and radical politics (c.f. The Yes Men for another example of such groups) into an overall strategy for direct action activism that looks back to the 1960s Yippies and Digger movements.  

Talen’s group of pseudo-revival anti-capitalists is interesting for a number of reasons.  While a number of religious groups are already heavily involved with social justice movements (c.f. some of the recent works by Marxo-Catholic literary theorist, Terry Eagleton, such as Reason, Faith and Revolution, also Goran Therborn discusses such activity in his short survey of global Marxism, From Marxism to Post-Marxism?), Talen, who takes on the appearance of a slick and savvy preacher when he performs, adopts the form of spiritual representation most closely associated with ‘televangelism’ and the American religious right.  Talen subverts that religious form by investing it with anti-capitalist fervor but he also maintains the ecstatic immanence of the Pentecostal revival, projecting it onto the image-addicted, senses-deadened shopper of the heavily mediated contemporary urban environment.  

What Would Jesus Buy?: Fabulous Prayers in the Face of the Shopocalypse appears to be a book of different aspects of the Church of Stop Shopping experience transposed into text.  The first few chapters are, presumably, transcriptions of some of Reverend Billy’s sermons, replete with neologisms such as “Change-a-lujah!”, words that combine the ecstasy of gnostic exclamations with the soundbyte quality of political slogans.  Thankfully, Billy included a glossary of these terms at the end of his book.  Billy moves from his sermons into describing what motivates his group to act, and describes some of the lead-up to an action.  The Church of Stop Shopping performs often in public or in private (commercial) spaces, and while their actions often appear spontaneous, Talen insinuates that there is careful planning involved when he alludes to having cues that he waits for before springing into full reverend mode.  The book also describes a cross-country tour the Church went on, that brought them to locations such as the Wal-Mart head office and culminated in a visit to Disneyland.  This tour is also covered in a 2007 documentary about the Church, also called What Would Jesus Buy? that is viewable on video.google.com and in segments on Youtube (here's part 1):

What Would Jesus Buy? is an odd book.  It is a textual counterpart to a documentary film, and to a performance group, and naturally the experience of reading the book cannot be the same as crossing the path of a Reverend Billy performance action in person.  Talen’s text is not exactly a strong critique of consumer culture but it is amusing relief from reading heavy anti-globalization texts like Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s near-500 page opus, Empire.  The book is, however, useful to anyone conducting research on radical street theater.  Furthermore, there is something interesting about the (fairly long) segment of the book that includes Talen’s responses to individuals who left messages or ‘confessions’ on the Church of Stop Shopping website.  The impression is created that there are many people out there who do seek Talen’s counseling regarding their consumption habits, and Talen always obliges these seekers in his Reverend Billy voice.  This recalls the criticism that Raymond Williams leveled against advertising as a kind of imagery that adopts the forms and representational modes of spiritual art while emptying out it spiritual content.  It also recalls numerous suggestions made by cultural commentators that consumerism leaves people spiritually unfulfilled.  While Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping (now Life after Shopping) may not be a real reverend and church, they ironically seem to return some form of spirituality to the lives of people made desolate by consumerism.

red army faction - film - 2008 - The Baader-Meinhof Complex

The Baader Meinhoff Complex
2008
150 minutes
directed by Uli Edel

   The Baader-Meinhoff Complex is a 2008 film directed by the German director, Uli Edel, who I otherwise only know from a mediocre 1989 film adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr’s novel, Last Exit to Brooklyn.  In this film he creates a partial and fragmented dramatic history of the Red Army Faction which serves to display them as violent freedom fighters without much critique of their methods.  The result is that quasi-Marxist terrorists are portrayed as the heroes of an action movie.  Whether or not this was the director’s intention was unclear, but this film conveys a similar cinematic vocabulary to the Star Wars films. 

The Red Army Faction were a group of West German based Marxist rebels active during the 1960s into the 1970s.  The RAF believed in armed struggle and may be interpreted as a European analogue to a similar American group called The Weathermen. The title of this film referrs to the alternative name for the group, the Baader-Meinhoff gang, referring to its two best known members, Andreas Baader, and Ulrike Meinhoff.  The film depicts these two figures as engaged in a dialectical struggle of thought vs action which is a perrennial issue manifest in the rhetoric of activism.  Ulrike Meinhoff was a brilliant journalist with far-left leanings who became the intellectual voice of the group while Baader was a criminal with little education, and formed the id of the group consciousness.  Baader is represented as uninterested in political concerns in any way that does not appear superficial, and rather appears to sense that action is the most important course to take.  

While Baader and Meinhof appear to represent the two poles of the group, (and serve as metaphors for the two poles of all of radical politics) there is a third major character, Klassen Grundun, poised between the two best known group members, who may actually represent the axel of the unstable unit.  In Edel’s film, Grundun nurtures Baader’s will to violence, even if its directed towards ridiculous gestures such as an arson attack on a department store.  Grudnen also shames Meinhoff into committing to violent revolutionary action by ridiculing her profession.  Finally, Gruden pacifies Baader when he succumbs to his rage at group meetings, and recalls the exact perfect Mao Tse-Tung quotation to recite to the group to steel their resolve in a hard time.  She is the unacknowledged force that drives the group, while Baader is portrayed as the same kind of reckless wildman  archetype that propels every movie.

The film goes from scene to scene depicting the most dramatic periods of the group’s existence, without getting bogged down in any socio-political details that might take away from its pace or action.  Bombings, retaliations, the capture of the RAF by police, trial and deaths as well as a few episodes from the 2nd and 3rd generations of the RAF are all depicted, transposed into movie convention reasonably well by Edel.  The origins of the group are uncertain in the film, Ulrike Meinhoff appears to join the Red Army Faction sometime after an encounter with an incarcerated Gunden, but otherwise the terrorist cell appeared to have already existed, already bombing things that have no connection to their political cause.  So any reason for its existence is left unstated, and they appear to commit acts of politically motivated violence for unspecified or poorly articulated reasons.  Occasional quotes from Meinhoff’s writings aside, the intellectual side of the group is subsumed in the film by the spectacle of explosions.  The RAF’s prehistory, the allusion that these were the children of the Third Riech, generation, is a mere statement on the back of the DVD case.  It may be something worth exploring, but it’s not given any meaning in the film.  Instead, the group’s post-formation history is mined as a source of action packed scenes with the terrorists poised as heroes.

Edel’s film displays a terrorist group that is active in a Western democracy without justifying its existence.  Still, Edel constructs his RAF characters as sympathetic figures simply by humanizing them while portraying the police they fight with as nameless hordes.  The Red Army Faction appear as youthful, energetic fighters, while their enemies are the anonymous henchmen of old men who sit and dryly plot at a conference table.  

    The historical significance of the RAF can be set aside, really, as this film is little more than an action movie that unfortunately takes a complicated semi-Marxist terrorist organization as its subject matter.  In real life, police authority and liberal-democratic social organization continues to dominate western countries.  Recent films that use countercultural groups, if not armed rebel movements such as the RAF, as their subject matter, consistently portray such groups sympathetically, if not outright heroically.  Why is there such disparity between dramatic representations of such subject matter, and actual social attitudes towards the sorts of groups being represented?

anti-globalization - film - 2002 - Video Active 4

Video Active 4
Toronto Video Activist Collective
2002

Hi out there in the Cyberweb!  I borrowed Video Active 4 from the Toronto Zine Library.

Video Active 4 is a compilation of video shorts by the Toronto Activist Video Collective, a loosely organized group of activist filmmakers who first came together in 1998.  The content of Video Active 4  is a collection of documentaries about various demonstrations and protest actions.  Most of the films document direct actions in Canada, however some are based on events that occured elsewhere.  Two films are shot in countries other than Canada, they are La Lucha Sigue by Tony Neale, which documents EZLN summit activity in Mexico, and Gustavo Benedetto Presente by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein, about a protester named Gustavo who was murdered by police firing indiscriminately into a crowd.  These two shorts bring some variety in message and style to the compilation, much of the imagery of each film is remarkably similar to one-another.

Many of the films primarily focus upon the aesthetics of protest action, with little focus on the issues that were driving protests.  This was especially frustrating with the film called Map of a Restless Northwest, about an organization called Pacific North West Economic Region.  There was little explanation of what this organization actually was, or what it’s purpose is, what kind of threat it presents and who is threatened by it.  The video weaves together footage of an activist leader speaking at a meeting about their immanent protests and police confrontation, with footage of protesters interacting with police, but it doesn’t explain why this exchange is actually occurring.  

Many of the films follow suit, alternating between a display of action, and brief statements issued by the participants.  These shorts represent protest as carnivalesque action, as exuberant confrontation with police, but not really as collective will to demonstrate opposition to power.  There is rarely rationale presented in these shorts for why the protests being filmed are actually taking place, or why mass protests are appropriate responses - presumably these films are intended for an audience who has already been initiated into the exciting dynamics of direct action protest.  This audience likely does not need to be persuaded against various forms of power, nor does it need to be assured of the meaningfulness of such protest.

This issue of representation is pushed to an absurd limit when it is revealed that one of the film shorts is a music video for a band.  While music videos are known as sites of empty imagery and appropriation, here the most notable thing is that the music is the only thing that makes it different from many of the other films contained on this compilation.  I don’t think I really noticed if the footage used in the music video was unique from the footage used in any of the other shorts.  I don’t think it matters.  

The urgency of most of these films has passed, and now they can serve as somewhat superficial records of the protests of Toronto and elsewhere during the early 00-years.  These videos are low on information but they can still be read as a protest tactic in themselves.  I am unclear of what the effects of such films are other than to excite and steel the resolve of those who are already active in protest.  These shorts display how the activists who engaged in such activities have chosen to represent themselves on video.  There is a sense that the protests being represented are basically intended as large spectacles meant for media reproduction, and films such as those on Video Active 4 are perhaps efforts made by the participants themselves to control that reproduction.

The Toronto Video Activist Collective is still active in 2011.  I do not know if they continue disseminating compilations of their work, however they do maintain a Youtube channel at: http://www.youtube.com/user/TVACdotCA.  Some of the films contained on Video Active 4 are viewable on the TVAC youtube channel page, however their recent material is of much higher quality than the early works, and engages with issues of concern much better than those films.