Izzy Adkins
The movie is surprisingly subdued in its pacing, its characterizations, and its go-for-broke sensibilities.
poe-48833
We know, now, that 60 MILLION people have been "displaced" thanks to what this Company (the U.$.) has done; we have Donald Rump "running for CEO" of this Company (that "The Dumpster" puts his foot in his mouth every time he opens it is par for the course: clowns have been running this Circus for decades); and the WARS drone on and on, one after another, an endless litany of Crimes Against Humanity in what Norman Mailer called "the crazy house of History." HOW has all this come to pass? Mailer (in THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT): "Modern audiences... put aside their reading at the first annoyance and turn to the television set." (The TWONKY.) "The authority had operated on their brain with commercials, and washed their brain with packaged education, packaged politics." As he surmised so astutely: "The 20th Century was in the process of removing the last of man's power from his senses in order to store power in piled banks of coded knowledge... the absolute computer of the corporation." And, as the people profiled in SILENCED learned (the hardest of ways), "the bag of the law is a bottomless bag" (as Mailer put it) and (Mailer again) "in this capital of technology land beat a primitive drum." (See REVENGE.) Whistleblowers as VILLAINS...? "Something was wrong in the air." The War On Error, let's call it- the error being BEING HONEST. "Yes," writes Mailer: It was a battle conceived unlike any other, for in a symbolic war, victory had no tangible fruit." As more and more whistleblowers come forward, this Company may one day find itself on the receiving end of some serious backlash. Or, as Kipling (quoted by Mailer) put it: "By all ye cry or whisper, By all ye leave or do, The silent, sullen people Shall weigh your Gods and you."
