“The Truth Is Complicated”
Four new trailers were posted to Apple’s trailer site yesterday: Garden Party, Kabluey, Diminished Capacity, and Traitor. The descriptions of all four films play off the idea of radical human interconnectedness and the rich tapestry that constitutes a life. More and more, since Babel or maybe Traffic (or, even, earlier: Magnolia) films have drawn upon the meaningful chance encounter within a constellation of characters meant to stand in for the larger whole of the social (I am aware we could trace this idea much further: I’m interested in the proliferation of this narrative form at this present moment).
As a researcher interested in transhumanism, I’m very interested in this new filmic plot device (I won’t get into Fredric Jameson on the Utopian potential and boom/bust cycles of film genres, but interested parties should read “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” in the first issue of Social Text), and how these sorts of films constitute a new genre of cinema (perhaps we should call it the “pre-singularity film”) full of Utopian potential centered around the coming spiritual singularity suggested in the works of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo. While films, like Babel, may merely constitute the latest iteration of Hollywood cannibalizing successful films to extract the last dime from this concept of radical human interconnectedness, I think these pre-singularity films are suggestive of the larger memetic spread of transhuman ideas (and good transhuman ideas, to boot (I’m sure I’ll get around to explaining good and bad transhumanism at some point)). The fact that so many of this kind of movie should show up on a mass-media portal at the same time is suggestive of the growing global awareness.
