Can Sinema Ever Be Radical?

I sometimes doubt that film can ever embody anything other than unbridled capitalism, oppressive surveillance, and violent control. I sometimes see in film a heavy leaning on non-traditional traditions, a mechanized process prioritized over the end result, and an unwillingness to deviate from corporate guidance.

I begin to doubt that film could ever be radical or progressive.

Consider this video.

 This is a nice encapsulation of all these things. I’m not saying it’s everything, but it should haunt its star forever.

The thing is, it’s pretty clear she did this because she wanted people to see it, wanted it to be memorable. I have a minor conspiracy theory that she voted this way, made sure this would become a video of a senator casting an appalling vote in an insulting way, so that when that vote was criticized she could claim that criticism of the heinous vote and the slap-in-the-face way it was cast is SEXIST, because in case you hadn’t heard, she is in fact a woman.

Films can rock us to our core, they can shake our foundations, or they can just reinforce what we already know. The trouble with the video above is that images, even images combined with sound, don’t tell the truth, and they don’t lie either. We read into them what we read into them. Just as I interpret the film one way, someone else sees something else. We are inclined to read art as a mirror.

That’s why film might never be radical, might fall perpetually into a reactive, regressive space. I fear that film will always be little more than an instrument of the powerful, at best simply reinforcing what people already think, at worst dragging people like a gravitational field towards the hegemonic norms that live in our psyches whether we like it or not.