A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Isabella Balkert and the Amazon Factor

 

It is quite clear by now that social media have played to a lower common denominator than even the critics of television as the lowest common denominator could ever have imagined. Both Google, particularly its YouTube division, and Amazon have played a major role in this dumbing down of the already dumbed down. I was reminded of this recently when I looked up a film on Amazon, a site that used to be easy to use in order to find what one wanted but which is now one of the worst even when you put in the actual title of a book, a movie, or a CD.

I was reminded of this social media dumbing down recently after I watched the 2005 film Conversations with Other Women on the This channel. I was pleasantly surprised by the film as I had almost forgotten that once upon a time independent films with wit, intelligence, and even some cinematic innovation, i.e., art, in other words, were made in the United States, a land where most films have been made for adolescents, literal and metaphorical, since the 1970s in order to "entertain" them and increase craporate profits. Independent American cinema, of course, was put on life support thanks to the Machiavellian strategies of the oligarchic suits who run Hollywood, strategies which included the buying up of independent production companies which were subsequently downsized of eliminated, the blackmailing of cinema houses--which are also dominated by crapitalist cartels--in that tried and true crapitalist and craptorate way--if you want to show our films then--and Hollywood's success at regaining control of the means of production, distribution, and exhibition, aka synergy in postmodernist capitolese over the film industry. This, of course, made it virtually impossible for independent films to be shown in the US and Canada and even beyond if to a lesser extent in places like France after a time. By the way, this was also, and not surprisingly, the same strategy Hollywood had used to run foreign films out of the US and Canadian market (and even beyond its North American kingdom to some extent) and who used their positions of market dominance to create a ratings system blessed by Washington that ran pornography out of theatres during those same years. Hollywood, you see, has never liked competition anymore than they liked much in the way of narrative innovation. All this, by the way, made the 1948 US Supreme Court decision breaking up the Hollywood cartel something that had been thrown into the dustbin of history for by the 21st century Hollywood once again controlled production, distribution, and exhibition putting the Hollywood cartel back in place thanks largely to neoliberal free marketism, a wonderful misnomer to describe a crapitalist world dominated by vertical and horizontal (the old and more descriptively and accurate terms compared to the faddish synergy) integration and the resulting craporate monopolies and cartels, and propaganda which, whether in primary or secondary forms, socialised and socialise the post-Star Wars "kiddies" into a world in which the blue meanies include black and white films, subtitles, and repetition

But back to Conversations with Other Women: After watching the film I thought I might buy it. So, I went to Amazon to see if the film was still available on either blu ray or DVD. What drew my eye almost immediately, however, were the "reactions to the film in the dumbed down and even dumber downed Amazon "review" section . One reaction in particular drew my gaze, a reaction by Isabella Balkert apparently posted on Amazon.UK in 2007. Balkert gave the film one star compared to over 70% of reactors at the time of this post who gave the film 4 and 5 stars. She did so, she claimed, because she found the split screen technique, the interior reactions of the characters, and the flashbacks in the film, flashbacks which provided critical plot points, too difficult to follow simultaneously. I suppose these more complex art films way too difficult to follow for someone presumably brought up on movies made primarily for those with limited cultural capital and limited attention spans.

Balkert went on to condemn art films in tried and true and predictable ways. She condemned the film as pretentious, boring, and the acting awful,  Pretentious and boring, of course, are the rather boring cliches of those for whom any film that strives for art rather than "adolescent" entertainments and tells us more about the person uttering such rhetoric than it does about the film being "reacted" to. As for Balket's claims of bad acting, this is rich coming from someone who, I assume, is an amateur and who has never acted in a feature film in her life according to IMDb. This discourse, one which ignores the fact that Helena Bonham Carter has been honoured for her acting by her peers, i.e., those who work in film. She has, in fact, to note two examples of awards she has received, BAFTAs and Emmy's to her name and has been nominated for academy awards twice. Someones, in other words, find her an excellent actor as do I. The other lead in the film, Aaron Eckert, has also been praised for his acting chops by many critics, particularly for his performance in Neil LaBute's art film In the Company of Men. Needless to say, Balkert is the pretentious and boring one here given that she seems to be speaking in cliched tongues and offers no empirical evidence to substantiate her very weak godlike claims.

If I may, I would like to offer some advice to "Critic" Balkert. I would advise her to stick to the (occasionally gloriously) simplistic, formulaic, and linear films of paint by the formulaic numbers Hollywood. In fact, there is a simplified version of Conversations with Other Women which eliminates the split screen as an alternative for those traumatised by art films and their artistic complexit. There i, after all, room for flims of all types whether genre grounded, artistic, surrealistic, complex in its narrative, or even "adolescent". It is too bad Follywood doesn't recognise this any longer.