Mass Production

And as human labor is commodified and systematized, taken from the land and the studio and the workshop and put in the computers and the marketing groups and the demographic-dominated projects, does this not do something to our dignity? Does not the mass production of movies take something away from us?

The miasma of mass production is disruptive to the formal relationship between a man’s mind and his craft. As much as it brings us wealth, it cheapens us, and as much as it gives us liberty, it wipes away the texture of many of the places we might go.

For all the wonders Henry Ford offered the world, I can’t help but remember his extreme beliefs on how human beings ought to spend their lives, and the famous quotation that he first said to Snoop Dogg when he pitched him a role in Soul Plane:

“You can fly a plane in any kind of movie, as long as it’s black.”

Chev Chelios, the Jurgis Rudkus of the Hollywood Stockyard

Jurgis Rudkus is the hero of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle – he’s a strapping, strong-willed Lithuanian who just tries to do his job, but he and his family are subjected to cruel, absurd abuse after cruel absurd abuse until it drives him to extremes – joining a socialist movement.

Chev Chelios, the hero of Crank and Crank 2: High Voltage is the strapping, strong-willed Englishman who just tries to do his job, but he and his girlfriend are subjected to cruel, absurd abuse after cruel absurd abuse until it drives him to entirely different extremes.

Industrialization and commodification of people – breaking down cogent groups into their component parts and optimizing them for maximum efficiency, always carries with it the tremendous capacity for abusing human dignity. Crank and Crank 2 are the sly, tongue in cheek fulfillments of this commodification – the optimization of the action movie. The reality is semi-mechanized, the set pieces swallow up reality, the action is overblown to the point of madness, and through all of it, the main point, the motivating force behind all of it, is that Chev Chelios is being subjected to just tremendous physical and emotional abuse to the point where his world melts into an inhuman, surrealistic madness.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMPwFHiyQdk

If only he could have joined some sort of labor union for hit men with electric hearts . . .

“The cup of iniquity is full, the grapes of wrath are ripe, and now God crushes them in awesome judgment. Those who have rejected His grace feel the terror of His wrath.”