Recent Film Viewing

Girl From Monday is a wicked parody of the Bush Administration and the possible future that corporate America intends for us. Hal Hartley is right that it is high time for science fiction writers to begin to imagine capitalist dystopias such as the one he depicts here. After all this future doesn't seem implausible given the Bush Administration's ultimate generational goal of privatizing all of the major public programs we now take for granted - Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Head Start, etc. It is really the very idea of public space which the Bush Administration feels threatened by, as if democracy itself is a relic of the Cold War which now must yield to the invincible future of the market-state. The notion of privatizing the body itself, i.e. rendering one's own body merely another commodity to be invested in, bought and sold on the market, is not so far from what the market fundamentalists hope to achieve. After all, capitalism always requires new markets, and if that logic continues unchecked, eventually there will be no space that is not commercialized - even your own dreams.