In which two German products duke it out, and Marxism wins.

I once clinched a game of "Battle of the Sexes" for my team by knowing that BMW stands for Bavarian Motor Works, which just goes to show that knowing your economic bases really is good for something.

So I did more reading than was required (and as a result, Jeff, you may have to do more reading than is required when my post is longer than 500 words), and it helped me to see the way that base affects superstructure (that reading also refused to pin down one exact definition of a Marxist reading, which was less helpful). Barry states that "Marxism is a materialist philosophy: that is, it tries to explain things without assuming the existence of a world, or of forces, beyond the natural world around us, and the society we live in" (150). So, all the philosophy, religion, moral codes, etc. that we adopt are purely created by our material reality. In The Critical Experience (196-197),David Cowles explains this by relating this example: most societies accept that stealing another person's property is immoral (which we attribute to ethical or religious codes), but this is entirely based on our notions of personal property and ownership (a material reality). If our material reality was based more on shared ownership, the notion of stealing as wrong doesn't hold, because there's no such thing as stealing what you already own. Thus, the superstructure (don't steal) is entirely shaped by the base (property ownership).

So, taking Marxism way down to its basic roots, I would like to try to locate the base of the film, and see how it affects and creates the superstructure.

Jeff fairly easily addressed the base: this is a commercial. The basic, material reality of this film is that it was created to sell a car. Any notions of aesthetic beauty, interesting stories, or universal themes are all foregrounded by this reality. We create assumptions about the characters based on their own material realities (Good car = good guy. Bad car = bad guy).

It could also be argued that within the story, even the characters shape their moral systems entirely based upon their economic motivations. Clive Own is the hire. Not the volunteer, not the friend, the hire. Any desire he has to help this boy--any loyalty he feels for him, any desire to protect him--is based entirely on the material reality that he will be paid. It is highly likely that the men with the materially (in case you're keeping track, I have used the word "material" in its various forms nine times so far) inferior cars are also putting their cars and their lives on the line for a similar reason, and it is not a stretch to say that had the price been different, Clive Owen may well have been the one trying to shoot the boy, not save him.

It is both interesting and difficult to view texts this way, because I feel like they start to fall apart. If everything is a construct of economic realities, is there such a thing as authentic art? Where does personality (not to mention spirituality) fit into such a model? Am I programmed to value higher-level thinking because of my cushy middle-class upbringing? Am I programmed to like certain films based on their material success? I'm not saying that I find anything morally questionable about paying artists for their work, but viewing any artifact through a strict Marxist lens tends to reduce it to mere product, valuable for sustaining the current material system.