Maybe Huxley was Right...

Shopkeeper: "And I'm telling ya, that green beer you want me to push is no good!" Capone Thug: "We don't care if it's any good, Pops! We just care if it's sold!" -From David Mamet's screenplay of 'The Untouchables'

This post is not so much a review of "Meet the Spartans", but an explanation of why it's the top-grossing movie in the country right now. (And coming up at number 2 is 'Rambo'!) I was thinking about this after reading the umpteenth review of movie critics shaking their head in disbelief that such a thing could even exist in the same universe that's given us 'No Country for Old Men' and 'There will be Blood'. So here we go.

What's going on is not that the movie-going public are a bunch of retards, but that the movie theater is fulfilling a social outlet. Given the demographics of the population seeing 'Meet the Spartans', in broad terms, the movie is fulfilling a purpose. That is, it's giving a pretext for a bunch of friends to get together after a week of school or job and enjoy a shared experience together. In other words, the movie in and of itself is unimportant, just that there's a context for having a social outlet. And in broad terms, 'Meet the Spartans' is designed to satisfy that outlet. You're not expected to bring anything to the movie, just to spend your ten dollars, plop your butt in a seat, and have a few chuckles for eighty minutes surrounded by your loved ones. And again, in the broadest possible way, that's a perfectly okay way to spend an evening. So I don't think there's any need for hand-wringing about the dumbing-down of our contemporary culture over the release of crud like this.

But.

From what I can tell, the movie aims as low as possible...and doesn't hit it's mark. What you go in expecting to see is a bunch of slow-pitch gags ripping on pastiches of pop-culture-sort of like an eighty-minute version of 'Family Guy'- and any entertainment value is lost by mere virtue of the fact that you can see the gags coming a mile away, and you find yourself finishing the jokes before the actors on the screen do. Putting it in more concrete terms, it's like a fast-food franchise starts to sell the 'Crudburger', a lump of Grade-D meat indifferently grilled by sullen teenagers and angry immigrants, dropped on day-old buns, industrial-level ketchup and mustard, and shoved across the counter to you with an extra helping of hostility for fifty-nine cents...and marketed as such. ("Look, it's cheap and it fills a hole. What more do ya want? The Crudburger.") And you order one of the fuckin' things and bite into it...and there's a rat head in the meat patty.

Look, I'm not even going to bother discussing the movie itself- by this time, you've made up your mind about it, and there's no way any one with more than two digits in their I.Q. is gonna go see it alone. (Oh, man! I'd love to be, for a moment, one of those theater ushers looking at the sad, flabby failures of humanity going to see this movie all by themselves! I'd pull over one of my co-workers, point him out to them, ("Oh, check that dude out! He's using a length of rope to hold up his pants!") and feel morally superior to at least one person on the planet for even a few minutes...)

So I have to conclude that the makers of this hate me, hate you, and hate humanity in general. These mean, sneering, cynical pieces of shit sitting in some plush office in Hollywood alternating between lines of coke ("Oh, shit, dude! Dudedudedude! And then the King Leonidas guy says, 'What horrors will our enemies see fit to set upon us now?' and then there's this big musical dramatic build-up...and then we, like, cut to a close-up of Paris Hilton going, 'Tch. What-evah!' Dude, write that 'un down! I'm on fuckin' fire!) and doing Darvon to soften the cocaine crash. To be fair, though, I really don't think that when they're swimming in their vault full of money, they're gonna stop, feel around for a bit and say, "Oh, dude! Dude! This pile feels about ten bucks short! Oh, shit! We didn't get Tom Pajak's movie money!" "Shit, dude!" "Duuuude", and then start crying softly to themselves.

At this point in history, what we need to do is this... Institute a caste system like the one in Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World'. People like me (and you, of course) would be the Alphas and Betas of this bold society. We wouldn't set foot in theaters that showed this type of stuff, because we'd be conditioned at birth against it. ("Now when the baby sees the picture of Carmen Electra, we zap it with the taser! And when it hears the Britney Spears song, the metal probe up it's anus heats up to over a hundred degrees!") We wouldn't eat at McDonalds, we wouldn't read 'People' magazine, we'd be free to pursue our own tastes and interests without marketing firms trying to ram indifferently make dreck like "Meet the Spartans" down our throats with the same zest and vigor that a 'new fish' is raped in a maximum-security prison.

Better still, with this 'caste conditioning', I won't have to endure the surly, bitter hatred of the average wage monkey who has to wait upon me if I want a coffee or wish to rent a movie. You'd think they were in the SonderKommando units of WW2 or something. No, with a caste system firmly in place, I'd be faced with a cheerful smile and an eager hand just aching to sell me a phone or serve me a meal! And after they did their twelve hours of shift work, they'd head home to their cosy dormitories, pop their copy of the latest 'Family Guy' dvd into their ez-to-use player-(Only three buttons! Start-Stop-Pause for Tinkles-and-snacks!) and relax content, knowing that God was in his heaven, and all was right with the world.

Who's with me?