spacetime coordinates: in the near future of a zoned and enclaved United States of America with Disneyland city-states
Production:
Damaged PowerAid vending machine
Edited by Jason Harvey
Executive produced by Reggie Henke
Produced by Mackenzie Jamieson
Ny Footage shot by Johnny Frohman
Music by Jerry Paper
Staring Nate Varrone, Danny Catlow, Rich Sohn
Thanks a lot to Felix Petrescu (my main source for many things vimeo, cinematic, musical & digital culture related outside of this blog) for suggesting one of the most emblematic videos I have seen lately. On one side it is a fictitious, humourous, unruly dark anti-Disney nightmare. Frankly, the horrific ride and family trip to Disneyland gone bad from Escape from Tomorrow (2013) directed by Randy Moore appears benign in comparison with Rebranded Mickey Mouse. The rampage and amok generated by this short are on par with our daily media offerings , an experience exposed to the overdrive of the post-truth (military-entertainment powered) era.
On the other – Disneyland – is revealed as something else completely, not the Twilight Zone of Escape from Tomorrow, but a way to understand what capitalism looks like nowadays, how -using the title of a new critical reader -these forms of “mutant neoliberalism“ have proliferated. In a way, nothing appears familiar, mainstreamed or standardized because the most fringe things have been amplified by platform capitalism. We are dealing with a growing fragmentation and vectoring of oddity that no longer seems to stick to the old liberal mold. In a world where everything is reduced to self-promotional activity, Rebranded Mickey Mouse is also a parody of the “pitch”, of finding something out-of-the-box, of something “new”. Original satiric horror movies like the 2020 I blame Society movie or Brand New Cherry Flavor series start exactly when the pitch does not work, or when as a women horror director, you get an asshole ripping you off or geting all the credit.
You can only pitch your ideas to a mega-franchise and it is the only way to make an impact. An anarchic and sadistic Steamboat Mickey has already attracted the attention of Walter Benjamin early on (something that I tried discussing here). Benjamin remarked on both the liberatory potential of the Disney anthropomorphized mascot as well as how (later on) the brutality of this misbehaving surreal cartoon could be channeled into unhinged fascism for real. I hope I can elaborate elsewhere about the ventures of military-entertainment-Disney complex.
Rebranding Mickey Mouse format and style and technique is quite interesting. It is almost like a found footage short, but not quite. It looks more like a nature wildlife (or urban wildlife) movie because it uses a lot of infrared or at least night vision shots, surveillance footage, multiple CCTV screens and even at some point the ubiquitous Chinese facial recognition software shots – becoming a staple signifier in Western pop for high-tech dystopian authoritarianism. But instead of some hyenas or some foxes, you get a grotesquely painted guy with M Mouse ears talking into the camera while he roams trough the bushes, city or private homes.
Today’s geopolitical or technological fears have a certain look. Real or imaginary they show the impact on Western pop culture of more general trends or alignments and decoupling. Witch-house bands making a few years ago goth or healthgoth style video clips (thanks pnea for signaling this) have suddenly switched to something more geopolitically attuned. They are using in their latest music videos (in contrast with earlier standards) graphics and footage that shows or mimics easily recognizable surveillance aesthetics associated with “social credit” in China, or the facial recognition apps or traffic videos of Chinese jaywalking. Dark-tinted glasses are not dark enough today if they do not point in the direction of your currently preferred dystopian outlook.
I liked the fact that complete commodification has ensured that every extreme act (killing a Disney exec for example) by the Rebranded M Mouse is part of a promo campaign or a pitch to the mother company. One can only get the attention of higher echelons, and find employment as their new mascot if you are basically a break-in, and attract the attention of the police or law enforcement, that collaborates (almost like in the recent Trump indictment) to somehow achieve even more notoriety. More media coverage is good and the violence attracts attention. Violence is the only way today to show that one means business. Mayhem ensues when a supposed Disney fundamentalist stabs and kills the Rebranded Mickey M during a live press event. The whole media/platform environment works as a trampoline for such extreme acts and even contributes to aggravating and launching the 3 WW.
What I found refreshing is that is is not a war against an enemy from the outside, but an enemy on the inside: the very American household brand Disney. President G I Joe Biden is himself a deep fake president – and uses a deep fake voice to launch an all-out nuclear attack on all the Disneylands within US borders. It comes as no surprise that such an extraterritorial state model has become a reality. If as historian Quinn Slobodian reminds us in his latest book Crackup Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (that I haven’t had the chance to read yet), we deal with a long history of bizarre but very specific neo-liberal heretics, this video also highlights the difficult road towards an indefinitely postponed “market utopia” or catastrophe libertarianism. From the beginning, such individualist zoning has been aimed against Socialist states but was also a way to circumvent all market controls and discard both democratic mechanisms and gun controls (in the US case). This is a typically Western dream about Asian-Pacific development as a libertarian prosperity solution, an entrepreneurial wishful thińking about Free Economic Zones or freeports plans that has taken hostage the startup community. The reality has been that this economic model of anti-democratic success, based on specific Asian (HK or Singapore) precedents has been very difficult to replicate elsewhere, particularly without major state support and steady flow of subventions.
Disneyland in this short fictive video has in the meantime acquired the status of a “land”, opposed to the very idea of the 19th century nation-state. Well, anyway such Disneyland corporation separatism (always with US backup) has amassed more power than an average small country. At the same time, because of its association with Western values (both specifically American conservative values & individual freedoms), Disney is still open to sanctions or boycotts from the outside (see cancel culture in a larger global and non-Euroamerican context). So at the moment when Disney has become the American Dream export par excellence, the global giant has ij this video morphed into a smaller Lichtensteins or Luxembourgs or Singapores with their own laws (its own constitution?), its own private army, and a Disney Ministry of Defense.
One can see a lot of collusion between the global ailing (or at least reconfiguring) US hegemon and its autonomous entertainment arm with embassies in Paris and Tokyo. Disney has been a global arm of the US influence everywhere including Eastern Europe but it has also achieved a sort of untouchable autonomy. So let’s speculate further. As much as Google, Apple, FB, Microsoft, the Disney+ streaming service functions as a monopoly to elbow out Netflix, but also as a potential chain of extraterritorial microstates. You do not have only US army bases but also a chain of “degenerate utopias” masked as theme-parks (a term reprised by Darko Suvin from Louis Marin 1973), that have complete discretion over their non national labor force (hire-fire-and-dump them model), but also upon what is considered illegal or unwanted.
Disney as form of soft power certainly, but also one could easily spill over into hard power and global conflict. That is, whenever and wherever US interests and cultural imperial status quo in this matter seems threatened. It is really interesting to hear the calls for Big Tech regulation following the ridiculous but very telling bipartisan hearing of the TikTok CEO recently and hopefully this won’t be just a witch hunt. At this moment, no one sees the Disney conglomerate as a threat to national security, nor do they see Palo Alto BIG TECH as such a planetary threat closer to home, although these platforms were the ones spreading disinformation at home and destabilization across the globe. For me, this is actually the whole scope of this short mad video – to find a situation where a US household brand triggers the actual downfall of the US, not China or any other external power vying for global hegemony. What escapes most of the current analysis, and what Quinn Slobodian achieved in his recent book I think is making neoliberals wake up from their “Hayek island” dream. This is how the whole democracy rhetoric has been hollowed out from the inside by the very promoters of free trade within special economic zones. Ethno populism tends to obscure the fact that the whole national state discourse and ‘bring back prosperity’ or ‘make America great again’ at home is “perforated” (as Slobodian observes) by numerous tax-free special zones that aim to attract global investors and hope to emulate Dubai in UK, US or elsewhere.
As some have remarked earlier, the Joker villain – from the Batman (DC franchise) isn’t so much a villain but a sort of exemplary broker gone loose, a total libertarian freedom fighter nutcase that rearranges everything to his contingent liking. He’s not so much a nutcase but a perfectly unpredictable entrepreneur, someone that does not try to save the sinking ship of capitalism but helps to sink it with various antics and unpredictable moves, a disaster capitalist riding the Schumpeterian waves of capitalist destruction. How do you turn Mickey Mouse into a Joker?
My final point is that during an already divided, uncertain situation in big part made more uncertain by Big Tech stakes, only an external enemy can promote more unity among the PPP (public-private projects). So one could consider the Disney US civil war parody a sort of nationalist (Trumpian?) parody call for more unity and for tighter integration at home with companies that have been deemed too treacherous, too global or selling their soul to transnational interests rather than foment economic growth and jobs at home. Following this Cold War logic, we have to ignore the ‘feral’ nature of this video because its true meaning lies in the fact that it is framed as an experiment of a Public-Private consortium or a DARPA-style agency that wants to upgrade or pitch and infiltrate Disney, a conglomerate that has become too complacent or too soft, but that still has a global reach.
TimeSpace Warps 