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Governmentertainment
By David Cox
The Electorate as Captive Blockbuster Audience, Falling off Buildings into the Abyss of the Digital Zeitgeist - David Cox explores the inner Casino, the State Government's gift to the people of Victoria, Australia.
A recurrent visual theme in mainstream big budget blockbuster digital movies is a central character getting catapulted with the help of 3D software 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 computer mediated space in the modern big budget instant hit culture of 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 ducking for cover upon seeing for the first time a train approaching on the silver screen.
The verisimilitude with whichever 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 filmmakers, 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. Melbourne's recently opened Crown Casino; the new monument to governmentertainment a la Kennet (Jeff Kennet, Premier of Victoria) 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 commercial emptiness is a stern fortress of enforced mechanic 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 those cameras_. That would provide entertainment nothing within the main walls could ever provide. Bruce Sterling once told me a story of a casino security control room he visited whilst doing research for "The Hacker Crackdown" which made even FBI agents at the scene baulk at what they considered to be an invasion of civil liberties. 20 or more monitors, checking staff as well as the customers. "Fleecing suckers is a hard business", he said dryly as we drove around Austin back in 1995.
The Crown cinema only shows blockbusters and a massive 20 foot high epoxy statue of what looks like a cross between a fascist Mousseline railway station gargoyle and something from Warner Bros Movie World dominates the escalator up to the multiplex. It looks like its going to throw a massive movie reel at you. As if entertainment were something you copped on the chin, and enjoyed having thrown at you.
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 3.54am between flights.
And the plane trips we are waiting for are our own lives. Official entertainment offers an 'escape' which is 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 forcefully and without our permission, for us.
Exactly 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 Melburnians 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" and "Blake's Seven". These garish entertainments 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 full integration with the mediascape. Crown's shops are all entertainment based - blockbuster entertainment. It won't get built unless it's big, brassy, primary coloured, recently installed, brightly lit, overstaffed.
Welcome to the digital Zeitgeist of Melbourne, the 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 created 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 new horizon.
David Cox <paradox@toysatellite.org> is a digital media artist and film-maker based in Melbourne, Australia. |
