"All the better to manipulate you with my dears"

There was a good piece by Henry Giroux at The Smirking Chimp last week (dated 13 February):
Celluloid Heroism and Manufactured Stupidity in the Age of Empire. The author compares and contrasts three recent movies

Citizenfour, a deeply moving film about whistleblower Edward Snowden and his admirable willingness to sacrifice his life in order to reveal the dangerous workings of an authoritarian surveillance state. It also points to the role of journalists working in the alternative media who refuse to become embedded within the safe parameters of established powers and the death-dealing war-surveillance machine it legitimates.

Selma offers an acute and much needed exercise in pubic memory offering a piece of history into the civil rights movement that not only reveals the moral and civic courage of Martin Luther King Jr. in his fight against racism but the courage and deep ethical and political commitments of a range of incredibly brave men and women unwilling to live in a racist society and willing to put their bodies against the death dealing machine of racism in order to bring it to a halt.

The third film to hit American theaters at about the same time as the other two is American Sniper,

...a war film about a young man who serves as a model for a kind of unthinking patriotism and defense of an indefensible war. Even worse, Chris Kyle himself, the hero of the film, is a Navy Seal who at the end of four tours of duty in Iraq held the “honor” of killing more than 160 people. Out of that experience, he authored an autobiographical book that bears a problematic relationship to the film. For some critics, Kyle is a decent guy caught up in a war he was not prepared for, a war that strained his marriage and later became representative of a narrative only too familiar for many vets who suffered a great deal of anguish and mental stress as a result of their war time experiences. This is a made for CNN narrative that is only partly true.

I haven't seen any of the three movies. I'd have been happy to go see Citizenfour and Selma, had they been available locally, but that kind of film - the kind requiring some movement of the grey matter while also chewing on popcorn - isn't carried by our local cinema. The third mentioned movie, American Sniper was here on the day of release though - wouldn't ya know it! 50 Shades of Grey was here, right on the dot too, while movies such as Citizenfour and Selma don't have a chance of showing up. Our town's main cinema has 6 screens, two of which, (sometimes 4) are showing the same juvenile slash-bang movie, in 3D and normal mode. Sex and violence, sex and violence....keep 'em coming eh!?

Mr Giroux wrote:

Citizenfour and Selma made little money, were largely ignored by the public, and all but disappeared except for some paltry acknowledgements by the film industry.

Some part of the blame for the two films' poor returns has to be laid at the door of those dictating who shows what and where, rather than on members of the public who have no option, unless they are willing to take a 90 minute drive to a big city cinema to see an important, serious, thought-provoking movie.

Mr Giroux's last lines:

Maybe the spectacular success of American Sniper over the other two films should not be surprising in a country in which the new normal for giving out honorary degrees and anointing a new generation of heroes goes to billionaires such as Bill Gates, Jamie Dimon, Oprah Winfrey, and other leaders of the corrupt institutions and bankrupt celebrity culture that now are driving the world into political, economic, and moral bankruptcy, made visible in the most profound vocabularies of stupidity and cruelty. War machines and the financial elite now construct the stories that America tells about itself and in this delusional denial of social and moral responsibility monsters are born, paving the way for the new authoritarianism.

There'll be an argument put forward by cinema managers that they have to show the movies most likely to get "bums on seats", otherwise they'd be likely to have to put up the shutters, and get out of town. I guess that is understandable, but it causes a vicious circle doesn't it? If there's never an opportunity to see films like Citizenfour and Selma for people in small-ish towns in semi-rural areas, especially in "red states", those people will remain in the dark about a side of the stories with which they might never have been presented, considering their usual news diet is dished up by Fox News.

Maybe that's the plan though. Corporations running the movie theatre business, no doubt hand in glove with the politicians whose coffers they fill, have a vested interested in leaving certain groups in the dark. "All the better to manipulate you with my dears!".