Yesterday’s blott (R.U.R.) was partially inspired by a documentary called “Generation Wealth,” currently available on Amazon Prime.
Although the documentary is thought provoking, especially the commentaries by Chris Hedges, I cannot recommend the movie. It has moments of extreme vulgarity, and has a very unfocused, shotgun feel to it. The documentary is a parade of repulsive, unrepentant, shallow people; write/director Lauren Greenfield unsuccessfully tries to rehabilitate them at the end.
In the film, Chris Hedges describes the hedonism, narcissism, and ubiquitous sexualization that are the hallmark of our dying society.
IMDB: A documentary that investigates the pathologies that have created the richest society the world has ever seen.
The following photographs were collected in Greenfield’s book, Generation Wealth:
“[There’s been] a shift in the meaning of the American dream,” Greenfield notes in her own voiceover. “It’s almost like it has turned into a quest for fame and fortune.” Her film is heavy on such unacademic, feeling-based assertions – using only one journalistic talking head, socialist commentator Chris Hedges, to back them up – but this observation is a fair one on which to build a film.
At a time when America is in the corrupt grip of a president whose chief qualifications for the Oval Office, at least in the eyes of his devoted supporters, are both his vast personal fortune and his tabloid- and television-fuelled fame, now is as good a time as any to ask why such a large swath of contemporary society is so in thrall to glaringly visible displays of individual wealth.
Lauren Greenfield examines materialism, celebrity culture, and social status and reflects on the desire to be wealthy at any cost. This visual history of the growing obsession with wealth uses first-person interviews in Los Angeles, Moscow, Dubai, China and around the world to bear witness to the global boom-and-bust economy, and to document its complicated consequences.
Google Overview
Nick Allen of RogerEbert.com wrote that the film was “a stunningly deeply resonant documentary about notions as seemingly obvious as the value of love over wealth itself.” Jeannette Catsoulis of The New York Times wrote, “Darting from micro to macro and back again, squashing obscene consumption against child beauty pageants and ruinous debt, its structure makes for an unfocused thesis,” adding that “the through line… works.” Joseph Walsh of Time Out gave it four out of five stars, writing that the film “lays bare society’s obsession with affluence and excess with scalpel-sharp insight” and “makes for bleak and compelling viewing.”
To quote The Dowager Countess of Grantham Violet Crawley, “You men are so easy.”
….so easy to abandon your best interests, your responsibility to society, so easy to abandon your love for the least of your brothers, to the ecosystem. All it takes is the non-stop voices in our ears from TV, social media, movies, even our places of worship. Throw in a stupid cult leader with a “burn-it-all-down” mentality with a crippling need to be worshiped, and most men are ready for the Gentle Push.
The Gentle Push is what the WLBOTT R.O.R. provides….. the final siren song from cynically shaped fem-bots. We never learn what the fem-bots are promising the men, but there are the usual suspects: acceptance, dominance, power, self-righteousness, a validation for violence.
