Australia’s Cities are Becoming Theme Park Rides of Homogonised Banality
By David Cox
The Electorate as Captive Audience at a Blockbuster, falling off buildings into the abyss of the digital zeitgeist
A recurrent shot in mainstream big budget blockbuster digital movies is a central character getting catapulted into things: train tunnels (Mission Impossible) , countless oncoming floating cars (5th Element) off the side of a building into the dark metropolis (Batman Returns) off cliff faces (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade).
Catapulting the audience with them, these ride movie sequences sum up
the status of computers in the
modern big budget instant hit movies of the contemporary culture. The
sequences seek to provide the audience with an experience close to that
of Lumier’s audience upon seeing “Train Pulling into a Station” - a myth
around which survives that one audience member went ducking for cover upon
seeing for the first time a train approaching on the silver screen.
The verisimilitude with which ever increasingly proliferating arrays
of digital cinematic landscapes
appear on our screens impresses no end. I for one thrill at every new
technical marvel of illusion with which film makers, commercial or nay
can pull off their tricks.
These environments look as real as they do partly because our shopping mall mediated societies in the Western World have succeeded in making the ‘real’ increasingly fake. The Crown Casino, the new monument to governmentertainment a la Kennet has found for itself a place among the crassest and most obscenely bad taste architecture and style ever to grace Melbourne’s skyline. This vapid cavern of emptiness is a stern fortress of enforced pleasure. Domed cameras seem to have mushroomed on the ceiling of the place, making every corner of the whole building bristle with surveillance. Not even the department of correctional services could match the sheer scale of security which Crown has installed.
There seem to be as many security guards as croupiers at the card tables. I’d give anything to visit the control room of all these cameras. That would provide entertainment nothing within the main walls could ever provide. Bruce Sterling told me a story once of a casino security control room he visited doing research for “The Hacker Crackdown” which made even FBI agents at the scene balk at what they considered to be an invasion of civil liberties. 20 or more monitors, checking the staff as well as the customers. Fleecing suckers is a hard business, he said dryly as we drove around Austin.
The cinema only shows blockbusters and a massive 20 foot high epoxy statue of what looks like a cross between a Mussolini railway station statue and something from Warner Bros Movie world dominates the escalator up to the multiplex. Crown feels like an airport terminal - no light enters its inner sanctum save for that screaming from the countless fruit machines, videogames, bad sculpture and roulette tables, making it permanently 3.54 a.m. between flights.
And those flights are just as disconcerting as the digital death drops of the movies which are presented in the same spirit in our major theatres. We, like these characters, are plunged into the postmodern abyss which our culture has placed there for us where once daggy and familiar Melbourne TV entertainment personalities made us feel we knew them. “Zig and Zag”, “Homicide”, and “Countdown” once defined who we are as Melbournians in need of entertainment. It was bad, but it was local. It was crass, but it was daggily so. Half knowingly so. It was camp. It was fun. It was ours.
We watched telly in the early 1970s in rapture at “Deadly Earnest”, even so-bad-they-are-good sci fi television which rocked then as it rocks now like “Dr Who” “Blakes Seven” These garish entertainments which had at least the good sense to mix the crassness with a good dose of tongue in cheek camp. Now everything is imported and the crassness is definitely not ironic in its attempt at mass appeal - the movies, the games, the culture of Las Vegas, Reno, with all the restraint of Elvis’s Living room. This is entertainment so in your face and goddamned brightly lit that its ultimate effect is to reinforce a sense of global hegemony and and full integration with the mediascape. Crown’s shops are all entertainment based - and based in some way upon blockbuster entertainment. It cannot be so unless big, brassy, primary coloured, recently installed and overstaffed and patronised by dazed newcomers to Melbourne as a VR ride.
We have no nutrition in our cultural diet any more. Government backed fleecing of suckers has replaced the principle of looking after people’s needs. Bread and circuses distract us from major social problems. The stench of privatisation, and quick dollars is starting to make everyone gag. We’re starting to feel like we’ve had too much fairy floss, the digital ride of mall addiction has made induced motion sickness. The vomit of corruption is hard to get out of the carpet of Victoria’s increasingly fragile social consensus.
We are tourists on holiday at home. We are paying for a ride we can’t
afford, taking us to somewhere which exists only in the erased balance
sheets of sacked auditors and the digital nothingness that is our comtemporary
horizon.