Hollywood occupies New Zealand

Warner Brothers comes swinging its massive male member (yes, a vulgar metaphor, but nothing else quite does it) into New Zealand, growling, “Hey, wankers, suck this.” New Zealand falls to its knees, goes, “Okay, sir. What else can we do for you?” “Give us $25 million, and we’ll call it even.” So the kiwis do that, too.

Can it be? Hollywood is now calling the legislation in New Zealand? Labor laws have changed to accommodate Peter Jackson who did not want to negotiate with a union? And some of the business community is approving?

New Zealand is not an especially obvious consumer society. Close beneath the veneer of their friendly surface roils that surliness characteristic of a massive national inferiority complex. People and cultures with inferiority complexes are dangerous. So they sort of pretend to value your business until you ask them for something and suddenly they flip out, as if you have somehow questioned their manhood. They can’t quite figure out how to do sales. They never caught on to the idea that it shouldn’t cost you MORE to buy the large economy size than two of the small sizes. They consistently screw up at the cash register. No, this is not a society that values consumers. Modern life is not quite under control in New Zealand.

If you deplore the creation of the consumer, the society seems more authentic, more serious, at first, than flagrantly client-oriented societies. But then you start to recognize that the only difference between New Zealand and the civilized world is that these people are poorer. Their income is about half of what it is in Australia, western Europe, and North America. If they could figure out how to be consumers on the scale of the rest of the western world they WOULD do it. There is no virtue in their lack of possession or inability to sell things. They just don’t know how to be otherwise.

This is why the sight of John Keyes forcing legislation through the Parliament at the demand of Hollywood is so appalling. It lays bare the myth that New Zealand is a nice little place where people are poor but happy and genuine. For a few dollars they are ready to prostrate themselves before the Hollywood icon, which is something you aren’t going to see, even in the US. Especially in the US. Is this democracy?? The US is screwed up, but at least directors don’t decide the law.

There just isn’t any safe place in the whole world. The universe if run by business, and the desires of business are by definition good. No questioning of that basic premise. This is Nietzsche and Beyond Good and Evil, part 2. "The noble type of man experiences itself as determining values; it does not need approval; it judges, 'what is harmful to me is harmful in itself'." New Zealand sometimes pretends to disdain the vile exploitation, moral and physical, perpetrated by the masters of the universe, but it has shown once and for all that it wants to play. When the little guy stands up to the big guy it is touching. But when it trails the big guy around asking for a couple of scattered crumbs, it is just pathetic.

Suddenly I understand....

The outrage of the Tea Party has suddenly become accessible to me. Went to a film that was part of the Italian Film Festival. I already have a little trouble with the film festival, because in a manner characteristic of this society into which I have been exiled, the organizer, a cheap faux culture nouveau riche swindler, charges way too much for things that if he charged less he would actually make a profit on. It’s a serious failing of this culture – they can’t get anything right, but in business they are especially boneheaded. For example, he used to have an opening lecture on one of the films, which is a great idea in this university city, but he greedily charged $25. Nobody is going to pay that much to hear a lecture on an Italian film, whereas they would have gone in great numbers had the lecture been thrown in for free. So the attendance was so low that he dropped the idea – never occurred to him to offer the lecture for free as a way of drawing crowds. Believe me, there are plenty of university lecturers who would have given the lecture happily as a public service, a way of creating ties between town and gown.

Anyway, back to the outrage and the eventual link to the Tea Party. So this buffoon who runs the film festival charges way too much for his films. In a normal festival you can buy packets of tickets as a discount. Not here. Not only that – I went to see a film on Tuesday, especially because Tuesday at the theatre has a discount. But NOT it turns out for the festival films.

The helpless fury I felt gave me access to the Tea Party anger. It comes from the deep sense of injustice at a system – a system that you can’t really fathom but to which you can attach a dopey face, in this case the foolish festival organizer.

I knew then that if there existed a group of disgruntled people similarly stuck in this benighted country who wanted to throw a manifestation, carry signs, shriek against the cheats, hoodlums, and scoundrels running the film festival that I would be out there with them, screaming my hatred. Throw in the university and there is nothing that I wouldn’t say about this place, no lie so absurd that I wouldn’t believe it if it were to its discredit; there is NOTHING that I would not say about the people in charge and the mindless idiocy with which they bungle their jobs. Nothing can adequately express my loathing of this place – all I could do if asked what I think about things here is bellow like an enraged bull.

This is the emotion that motivates the Tea Party. I get dizzy with delight imagining how I would love to pile on a bus to be barfed out on the Mall and shriek my hatred of the Italian film festival, the university here, along with similarly irate people. The Tea Partiers, pissed off that they have lost their jobs and that a system to which they have no access seems not to be paying them any heed, want to howl at the world. I would howl along with them if my agenda matched theirs.