Criticism of capitalism in "Confessions of a Shopaholic" and "The International"

I guess it has become manifest that this is largely a film criticism blog from the perspective of someone who views the world in terms of animals and anti-capitalism. It is probably equally apparent that I watch crappy mainstream movies with relish.

Recently I saw "Confessions of a Shopaholic" and "The International." For those who miss commercials, the former is about a young female in NY who buys too much fashion stuff and the latter is about a cop trying to bring an international bank to justice for murdering people who interfere with its aspiration to control the production of war debt. (Baudrillard's essay on debt that I referred to in my last post is equally apropos here).

In some ways these movies are highly critical of capitalist processes. "Confessions" is about the debt cycle and over consumption at the personal level, "The International" at the political or transnational level. In both, these processes are destructive and promote harmful behavior toward others. Predictably, though, the forms of closure available to these texts as narratives are inscribed or prepared within the capitalist order. Both end, essentially, with an affirmation of the individual as that which can step away from and resist the systemic. This is the prima facie argument to be made against these films.

However, I think this kind of reading gives too much over to narrative structure--it basically agrees that beginning, middle, and end are where the (capitalist) plot says they are. If we imagine these films in an "eternal return of the same" scenario or as repeating in the sense in Difference and Repetition (which spends no small effort defining "repetition" as a technical term away from simply "doing it again") the loci called beginning, middle, and end are open to redistribution. The "middle" is where the critique comes out in these films, and the task of critical viewership is to relocate this to an end (with intentional reference to the philosophical "end" or purposively grounded state).

In "Confessions" this comes when the main character communes with animate mannequins who congratulate her on her new found discipline not to shop. Once one has broken from the capitalist imaginary, and specifically its ontological divisions, all kinds of things are able to speak and celebrate. There are more "subjects," not more divisions in kind between subjects. In "The International" this comes when an old cynical bank exec, formerly a Party hardliner with the Stasi, tells Clive Owen's character that there can be no justice within a fundamentally unjust system. Justice against persons is not politically relevant if it does not challenge the systemic nature of what elicits powerful criminals. That's what I say! If one stopped the film here, the climax would be a powerful, expansive, and completely accurate (from my standpoint) statement on what does and does not constitute politics. How could there be a better climax?



The only way out is for the film to interpolate itself in the space where the (critical) viewer should reassume his/her position in the world. The film takes on the role of action that, if arrested, it might have inspired in the viewer.