Some things appear to be innocent, like kittens, but they are not. See the world for what it is.Chosen is a commercial, not just for a car, but for a class system that BMW wants to perpetuate for their financial benefit. The car industry itself seeks to devalue the skilled worker by putting him or her on an assembly line to perform a repetitive task that neither requires nor generates any workable skill. A worker cannot leave the assembly line because they have no knowledge of building a car, but only of their assigned repetitive task.
Why does our main character drive a BMW? It must be a nice car. He is a skilled driver that is in the business of saving lives and can be trusted with precious cargo. His car must be able to do what he needs it to do. His counterparts are in the business of stealing and destroying. Their cars are inferior. Their many cars cannot catch and stop his one car, even when surrounded. Why would they drive these inferior vehicles? They cannot afford a nice car and even if they found the money, they can’t have it. This is what drove them to this life of crime and decadence.
The upper class, a restrictive class of one man, drives a clean and undamaged BMW to save the goodness from being made filthy by the many in the lower socioeconomic situation of rusted and damaged cars.
Ang Lee owns the product (Chosen) that the lower class has made. The hundreds of thousands of others who work on his films are mentioned, but not valued. This film is to perpetuate his capitalist agenda (see Hulk band aid).
Genre? It’s a commercial. Focus on selling you something you don't need or want.
Our goal is not to merely understand this world, but change it. We will be in classrooms where we can guide our students to do so as well. We (you, me, and our students) can obtain our goal of the classless society.
1 comment:
It's interesting how quickly we can become "snippy" or "biting" when we examine the economic relations at work within a text. I wonder if it has to do with the fact that we like the idea of free agency. We like to think of ourselves as entities who are capable of making our own choices and who are not influenced by the monetary concerns of others. We don't like being manipulated, and so when we look at something within this context, it quickly becomes culpable of trying to take away our agency, and we don't like it. This IS a commercial that focuses on selling something we don't need or want, and it does so, just as you said, without much reference to the many who were involved in the creation of it. But why are we so bugged by that? If we see what it's doing, why can't we just ignore it rather than get angry/upset/annoyed about it? I would guess that (though this is not necessarily my opinion) some would argue that our negative feelings are a manifestation of jealousy and that we DO, in fact, want this car. And if that is the case, wasn't the commercial successful?
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