And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine (Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck, 2023) (Patreon)

The state-of-the-media doc Fantastic Machine left me in deep despair, but probably not for the reasons it's makers intended. Starting off with the usual chestnuts -- Daguerre, Muybridge, the Lumières, Méliès -- the film seems intent on rehearsing the same history of visual culture that you could find on a Wikipedia page. John Berger's Ways of Seeing covers a lot of the same basic material, without the namedropping; the writings of Jonathan Crary fill in any gaps. Images, you see, are not evidence of truth. Rather, they are ideological constructions, usually very careful to disguise their internal rhetoric.

See the above: a Pulitzer-prize winning photo of a girl killed by the Haitian earthquake, while not exactly staged, is an image for the taking, and we see a group of photographers doing just that. News media uses green-screens and selective framing to make their reports more authoritative, by looking like they are on location when they are almost always filed from a hotel room. You know the drill. (The politicians' blooper reel Feed is also another obvious point of comparison here.)

I know I complained recently about the proliferation of freeform documentaries that try to channel the spirit of Harun Farocki. Well, guess what? It can be much worse. The broad concerns of Fantastic Machine intersect with a number of Farocki projects, in particular Videograms of a Revolution, How to Live in the German Federal Republic, and of course Images of the World and the Inscription of War. We see TV executives explaining that programs are just bait so they can deliver spectators' eyes to advertisers. (Oh yeah, there's a touch of Richard Serra's Television Delivers People in there too.) And this assertion leads, quite naturally, to the monetized internet and the attention economy. Smash that like button!

But in its tone, organization, and image choices, Fantastic Machine rewrites Farocki through the sensibility of Adam Curtis. So young people (especially girls) with their Insta accounts and their vanity, or the ahegao fetish popularized by Belle Delphine, are the most recent signs of the apocalypse, whereas the filmmakers conclude with what should have been an image that radically altered our consciousness -- Voyager's famous "pale blue dot" -- and so clearly did not. Instead, our limbic system gets off on reaction videos, garish training and recruitment productions from ISIS, and endless livestream banality. (If you're lucky, you might see someone getting Swatted!)

It may be a cheap shot to mention that Fantastic Machine was executive produced by Ruben Östlund. But this smug appropriation of Curtis's shtick makes perfect sense. Like Curtis, Östlund fancies himself a radical. (And I'll admit, he can be a savvy entertainer.) But these guys don't realize just how conservative they really are. That's because they seem to understand late capitalism as an epistemology, rather than a system of power and control. That's to say, we are trapped in a worldview that cheapens human life and rewards narcissistic self-regard. But these "critics" nudge us only just so far, because in the end, they think (like the capitalists do) that we are hard-wired for selfishness and cruelty. 

So we generate misery, gawk at it, and then distract ourselves with even more misery. Fantastic Machine doesn't say very much, but what it does say is insultingly simpleminded. Like the chimp scrolling through a photo roll to find pictures of himself, our basest instincts have transformed all areas of human endeavor -- work, art, politics, religion, sociality -- into demonstrations of Rule 34. No other world is possible, because we are too besotted with cat filters and epic fails to even notice how fucked we are. And because of that, Fantastic Machine's scolding auteurs want us to know that we are getting exactly what we deserve.