Disposable Futures : The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle by Giroux Henry A.; Evans Brad

Author:Giroux, Henry A.; Evans, Brad
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Lights Publishers

Let’s take as an example here the cruelty displayed within popular Hollywood films such as Fast Five (2011) and Acts of Valor (2012). These films, only two examples of an increasingly militarized popular culture, drench the screen in lawlessness and provide fast-rising volumes of sledgehammer blood feasts. The producers of Acts of Valor boast that the film uses live ammunition and shamelessly tout it as an avenue for recruiting Navy Seals and other soldiers needed for special operations missions in the age of unending crises.10 Gender by no means acts as a buffer from these dynamics. For instance, films such as Let Me In (2010), Hannah (2011), and Sucker Punch (2011) move from celebrating hyper-violent women to fetishizing hyper-violent young girls.11 Rather than being depicted as gaining stature through a coming-of-age process that unfolds amid representations of innocence and complicated negotiations with the world, young girls are now valorized for their ability to produce high body counts and their dexterity as killing machines in training.

Taking this fetish for violence to a more explicit pornographic level, Hollywood films such as the Saw series transcend the typical slasher fare and offer viewers endless, super-charged representations of torture, rape, animal cruelty, revenge, genital mutilation, graphic death blows, and much more. Whatever bleeds here—gratuitously and luxuriously—brings in box office profits and dominates media headlines, despite often being presented without any viable political context or ethical responsibility for making sense of the imagery or any critical commentary that might undercut or rupture the pleasure viewers are invited to derive from such images.

Representations of hyper-violence and human tragedy thus merge seamlessly with modes of forgetting that mediate the aesthetics of suffering. On the one hand they structure social relations through the exposure to violence. And yet, on the other hand, they attempt to remove from sight the systemic nature of such violence by relegating it to a personal and individualized experience. This is the true mask of mastery for contemporary neoliberal regimes of power. For as the quantitative assault of representations of anxiety overwhelm all qualitative deliberation on the meaning of their content, so we are taught to accept that things are fundamentally insecure, and thus we have no reason to struggle to identify the source of our suffering, let alone transform our conditions for the better.

In this regard, the more brutal and consuming the entertainment becomes, the less we are forced to consider the true depths of suffering faced by many on a daily basis. Hollywood films along with other elements of neoliberal screen culture have contributed to a violence-saturated culture that inordinately invests in and legitimates a grim pleasure in the pain of others, especially those considered marginal and disposable. The media thus increase their hold on the imagination, decentered and disconnected from any ethical criteria for the politics of their content and effectively disallowing a wider critique of the conditions that produce disposable lives in the first instance. Such mediation of aesthetic regimes of suffering and violence, coupled with the search for ever

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