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by Elena Steier
This was movie week. It all started with a DVD I got in the mail called Killer Condom, a German movie which supposedly takes place in New York City. Besides being a very nice adaptation of the Ralph Konig comic book, it is a mean parody of American detective films. On top of that, there is a little bit about an American president who falls prey to a voracious little condom. Just prior to this confrontation, the president gives a speech which is a nice view of how Germans see us...self-righteous, exalting God, claiming our country to be the greatest country anywhere, and kind of dumb.
Maybe because I'd seen Killer Condom earlier in the day, when I watched the Rob Zombie directed House of a Thousand Corpses I immediately drew a parallel. Maybe the murderously insane family of the movie wasn't exactly political material, but they did have the same self-righteous, enthno-centric view of the world as the president in Killer Condom. And they were dumb as shit, too, to boot.
The latter part of House of One Thousand Corpses has a bunch of trusting kids basically begging to be killed. I thought to myself, does this not reflect our own country's trust of the Bush administration? And as the last living kid vainly tries to elude her captors, I wondered how does someone as little and insignificant as myself fight my way out of a situation in which my country is being run by the powers of Bush?
The answer may have come in the third movie I saw last week. This was the documentary of the ill-fated making of Don Quixote, which focused on its director, Terry Gilliam. It's interesting to watch how confidenty he strides into the situation, complaining that the money he is getting is not enough, then promptly having elaborate sets built in anticipation of the arriving actors. Of course, he's making the film in Spain, in which a big budget film is considered to be about ten million dollars, and where the big sound studio turns out to be a barn.
To me, it is a metaphor for American hubris abroad, bringing with us our Hollywood sensibilities that our way is the right way. Much like our incursion into Iraq, Gilliam comes into the situation with preconceived notions but without knowing the language. And as his grandiose plans fall victim to one unforseen disaster after another, the plain economic truth becomes painfully clear. The budget just can't support the endless problems with production.
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