Review by Beatrice On 23-Jun-2023
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relationship between people, mediated by images
France de Meurs is a well-known television journalist, leading a hectic life between live broadcasts and war reports in distant countries. Her assistant, grotesque and superficial, constantly encourages her with coarse and trivial adjectives.
A car accident with a rider seems to shake France's unshakable equilibrium in both her private and public life.
Incapable of maternal attitudes toward her son and sentimental attitudes toward her partner, she lives with them in a stately home with imposing artwork on the walls and furnishings from luxury summer magazines.
From the first scenes, the journalist's success seems unquestionable; continually celebrated, adored, she flaunts a detached cynicism in a gear, that of the media, that seems to erase the demarcation between reality and fiction while nevertheless constructing a new reality of the world.
Colorful looks, magenta lipstick, Dior dresses, gala dinners and questions about capitalism.
The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes image
Reports in war zones completely reconstructed at the desk alternate with resorts of unbridled luxury.
France, however, decides to leave TV and start a new life, at least for a period of time; she wishes to be transparent and anonymous.
She will return to preside over war reports and news events; trying to do her best, however, she seems to no longer believe in any ideals; she considers everything dead except the present.
A film that continually blends fiction and reality to the point of making them indiscernible. The "real" world says Dumont is violently shaken by the almost parallel world of media and social networks. There is no longer any proportion or natural difference; everything is a spectacle of a reconstructed and distorted reality.
The line between fact and fiction has been erased and that is precisely why France, when she encounters the accident is brought back to reality and loses control.
She who seems unbreakable, bleeds fragility: she is so integrated into the cog of the (dis)information system that she no longer has the proper gaze to spot the differences.
The mass media industry makes journalists slaves to this transfiguration, servants of an ideological and commercial industrial system.
"Reality," Plato would say, is already the copy of the world of ideas, and that of the media is the copy of the copy, diseducative in that it is a feeble reflection, guilty of creating even more disorder and diverting man from the search for truth.
France more than an information professional seems a product, the allegory of media system that constructs representation rather than portraying it, with the purpose of exploiting current events as a source of indoctrination.
For Dumont, while cultural poverty, the cause of everything, is spreading like a plague, entertainment culture has become total.
Fiction is global, everything is television cinema or movie TV, and France is ruthless and naive, cruel and moving, mistress and servant, sadistic and masochistic, alienating and alienated. She does not seem real as nothing seems so around her, not even her existence so virtual though sacrificial.
The spectators are chained in the Platonic cave and what they see are only shadows as France, who has no moral conscience, tries to come to terms with the contradictions of her condition.
In this media barbarism everyone takes the form of his or her function, including the spectator.
The representation of an ontological dishonesty with the sole purpose of achieving its goals, at the cost of whatever means.
Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle ( 1967), which describes the modern society of images as a mystification designed to justify the prevailing social relations of production, seems to be the theoretical code on which Dumont builds his 133-minute feature film.
The spectacle is not a system of images, but a social relationship between individuals, mediated by images, a worldview that has become objectified.
However, it should not be thought, for Debord, that the spectacle is simply unreal; it as an inversion of the real is indeed reality, the spectacularization of which would take the place of religion, acting as the guardian of sleep from the shackled modern society whose bad dream it is.
And while religion imposes itself as a source of prohibitions, Debord's spectacle shows man what he can do where permission is absolutely opposed to the possible, like Adorno's Minima Moralia leisure is heterodetermined.
Therefore NOTHING NEW ON THE WESTERN FRONT
Our time prefers the image to the thing, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to being. What is sacred to it, is but illusion, but what is profane, is truth
23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice