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thank you for smoking
i enjoyed this film: it was smarter than i expected it to be, a good satire of corporate pr and its opponents, the snyews media, etc...good acting structured by an admirable degree of cynicism--which made arguments like those advanced by the main character nick something (cant remember) that tobacco corporations are like socially oppressed people laughable--which they are--and the idea that one can chooose to be a reactionary as a mode of defiance into the joke that it is.
but then i made a mistake.
i watched one of the special features: a segment of the charlie rose show in which the film-maker spun the film as a "libertarian" project and its reception as some kind of vindiciation of that smirking form of conservative acquiescence that is libertarian "politics"---you know what i mean--based on a vacant adolescent sense of superiority that follows from having read ayn rand and confused her with a philosopher and on that basis *maybe* read some nietzsche and got that wrong as well, which results (in this case) in an idiotic posture that infuses a defense of corporate actions with some kind of individual heroism, that accuses critics of corporate action as being "sheep" because they "just go along with what is fashionable" and "what is fashionable is the 'politically correct'" as if the only reason folk might wonder if contemporary capitalism is more than a little fucked up lay in its "being fashionable"...from there, these people posit a typically lame "libertarian" inversion--a one-dimensional egalitarianism as some kind of logical successor to oppositional politics---one "stands up for corporate actors" as a way of "being an individual" in the face of some halluncinated "pc"....
so when the film-maker and christopher buckley talk, they turn the film to shit.
but if you do not pay attention to this "liberatarian" drool and just watch the film, you see a pretty good lampooning of exactly this kind of "libertarian" defiance of a simplistic inversion of the figure of "The Man"...
from which a lesson: often the people who make something are stupider than what they make is. often it is better to just take in the film and let it remain open for your interpretation, and to ignore what the people who made it think they were doing in it.
another way: dont bother with the special features.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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