Is Jennifer Aniston Feeling Smug?

     I watched a movie from 1969 called Medium Cool, directed and shot by Haskell Wexler, a cinematographer who had a lot to do with the look of Dennis Hopper's great film, Easy Rider.  Medium Cool stars Robert Forster and Peter Bonerz as a TV news-documenting cameraman and sound man in Chicago in 1968 during the time leading to the civil insanity of the Democratic National Convention.  Forster's character possesses an unsettling objectivity for much of the film, looking at the world without emotion, framing it like the photographer in Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up.
     "I love filming," he remarks as he watches a TV documentary about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.  He makes no statement about the show's content and what it means for America in a year when Robert Kennedy was also killed.  Earlier, as they drive in Washington, D.C. soon after Robert Kennedy's assassination, Forster points out the camera positions for the funeral procession and notices how professional the set-ups are.
     "The JFK funeral gave them practice on how to do these things."
     It's a cool, professional, and admiring sentiment, devoid of emotion, yet capturing a culture that weds entertainment through televised performance with violence.  The Vietnam War at that time was also a dinner time TV show narrated by Walter Cronkite and other news anchors.  Wexler's film reminds me of J.G. Ballard's sensibilities as written about in that great English writer's fictions.  Ballard, especially in his masterpiece Crash, wrote about what he referred to as "the death of affect."  Through entertainment/news media, consumers are given a money-driven presentation combining the buying of goods and services with fictional and non-fictional programming intended to occupy time, the result of which often leads to indifference towards serious matters.  Now, the lines of text moving right to left across the bottoms of TV screens on news channels tell us, within the space of a few minutes or less, that the Russian military bombed a relief convoy in Syria, and that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have separated.  It's readily easy to find out that "people" are wondering about Pitt's ex-wife Jennifer Aniston's reaction to the latter story, but getting a well-researched report on the relief convoy's destruction requires hunting outside the cable news channels.
     This election year has given us two main candidates, both of whom are widely disliked and regarded as dishonest; basically, a pair of shits who run in the same wealthy circles and lack souls.  Medium Cool, its scenes shot amid real events, including the riots, shows an America acting before the television lens, a preview of our world now.  As I write this, Charlotte, North Carolina, undergoes its second night of civil unrest and protests in response to the killing by a White cop of a Black man sitting in his car, reading a book according to one account, or holding a gun according to another.  The cops, in any case, have been vague with their information, and withhold details, as is typical with institutions when they're hiding damning evidence.  Slow leaks of information characterize police departments when they commit wrongs.  The same happens with the Defense Department.  They're always slow to admit U.S. forces have killed civilians, although they're very quick to speak out against other nations that do the same.
     Tear gas, a chemical weapon, has been used in Charlotte tonight.  Cops in riot gear against mostly peaceful protestors.  Some scuffles; seven cops, I heard, went to the hospital with unspecified injuries.  Considering their body protection as compared to the regular clothing worn by protestors, I'm trying hard to imagine how they got hurt.  When I see masses of armed cops looking like soldiers in a war zone, I can't feel sympathy for their side.  Their very presence wearing such garments and using tear gas is an antagonizing factor, riling up crowds rather than pacifying them.
     The great philosopher Donald Trump said, of the Charlotte cop killing the citizen, "I'm very, very troubled."  He went on to promise that he'll "fix it."  Trump, who has never demonstrated he's anything but a racist and a megalomaniac, assures voters he'll make race relations work in his America.  It's a preposterous claim, like his desire to make the United States military into a behemoth that would actually only do crippling economic damage to the country, and alienate the world further against this nation.
     Trump and Clinton demonstrate an emptiness of character that has logically come about from a slow at first, but accelerating decline in the quality of perception among Americans mesmerized by the surfaces of images, the realm of Medium Cool, while propagandists persuade their consumers to look at wherever the real crimes and scams aren't.
   
                                                                             Vic Neptune