// archives

Ethics

RSS feed for this section
This category contains 19 posts

Just A Little Conflict Investment

By Jason Ensor ⋅ May 6, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

I’m growing very tired of the superhero genre lately and its rather repetitive instances of urban gang warfare between chemical, genetic, extraterrestrial, supernatural or technologically-enhanced freaks. As Theodor Adorno might say, contemporary cinema is certainly providing the public with an “unconscious canon of what they do not want, that is, something different from what they are presently being fed”. How many times should we endure the same narrative structures and sequences, the same beats, the same super-augmented character battling it out with another super-powered character in a city or highway setting, throwing cars and people about like raging toddlers with their toys? It was innovative the first time in Superman 2 (1980) but after Hulk, Fantastic Four, X-Men 3, and now Ironman (and Edward Norton’s soon-to-be-released The Incredible Hulk), it seems probable that road rage is becoming the metaphor of our times and the lazy conflict device of contemporary cinema.

Our Threshold of Responsibility

By Jason Ensor ⋅ October 3, 2007 ⋅ Post a comment

Like everyone else, when I talk with other people who share living on this land that I call Australia and home, I often slip into using the term “we” and “our” when referring to the actions or inaction of the Australian government on issues I align myself for or against. It’s an easy slip for me to make, for I am encouraged to identify with the actions of strangers as my own on a daily basis. The intensity of one’s support for various football teams and AFL players I have never shared a beer with is an easy example; one’s support for or against Australian soldiers in Iraq is another. But both reflect our participation in a system that we are not major decision-makers in but which we are coerced into identifying with so that we become almost inseperable from them: “our team won!”, “our boys in Iraq are doing their bit!”, “our preferred political party is in office!”.

—