"Zeitgeist": Not a sign of the times, but a definite must-see documentary nonetheless

A review by Chris Kaihatsu, ckaihatsu (at) gmail.com, 3-31-08

I've been around politics since I was first radicalized, while at college, by mass marches against the first Gulf War. On one chilly day I was on my way to the meal hall, in an adjacent dorm on campus, wearing just jeans, a long-sleeved shirt over a t-shirt, and I heard a sustained roar coming from the nearby street. I impetuously walked over to see what was going on, and saw hundreds of students flooding the street with signs, yelling and chanting against U.S. military involvement in Iraq. I instantly decided this was worthwhile, and I skipped the meal, braved the chill, and jumped into the river of bodies flowing through campus and beyond.

In the days and weeks that passed since the initial marches and protests on campus, in town, and to downtown Chicago (after taking trains to get there, that is), I slowly decided that I should probably get some background to the political issues behind the war against Iraq, and to the political world as a whole. I'd been noticing flyers around campus more than I had before, and so I finally attended a meeting and thus started my political education.

In hindsight it was a very good decision, and I was at school, anyway -- my political education wound up complementing my sociology and history studies, which were preparation for a career in teaching high school history. Through my political education I was able to discern that some of my professors tended to be more left-leaning, and others weren't. For my own development of curriculum the politics served as a very good framework, a valid sociological backdrop to whatever period and personages were at hand. In later years I'd actually formalize a framework, rendered with a freeware 3-D program, called "History: Macro-Micro."

I mention all of this to introduce myself in my authorship of this critique of the documentary "Zeitgeist," a work which is too notable to be viewed lightly, or to be passed over altogether. I was introduced to it through the 9-11 Truth list that I am on, in Chicago. After getting the movie through its torrent I watched it and found it to be a complex work, informative and well-researched, well produced, and well-meaning.

It is the first three qualities of the documentary that are unimpeachable -- as a documentary is it very worthwhile and easily overcomes cursory dismissals of it being the work of "conspiracy theorists". For anyone who relies on that political slur as an easy crutch this movie will be an eye-opener, as it is done with attention to detail, is worldview- and politically astute, tactful, and with first-rate production values. Incredibly, though it handles a wide array of serious, grave issues, it remains quite easy to watch, striking a delicate balance between being educational and being watchable, and in dealing with controversial subjects at that. It does not shy away from a viewpoint, nor does it beat you over the head with it -- if anything it employs a level of finesse in pacing that is practically hypnotizing. If it weren't for its conclusions I would probably not bother writing this review, because, aside from its political conclusions, it remains a very good, informative documentary for anyone to see. It is only its political conclusions that I will take issue with.

The movie opens with a quickly shimmering, cyan colored rectangle, including iterations of itself that draw towards the background in a quasi-television-feedback manner. It serves as a mentally clearing moment as the voiceover kicks in. Onward the movie leads into shots of explosions in warfare, then shots of the earth from orbit, some cosmic / solar system travel sequences, then sky shots, cloudscapes, then oceans, and then bacteria, leading into a simple line-art animation that depicts evolution from bacteria to human being, arriving at the writing of math, then a shot of the bible, then the American flag, and then repeated shots of the explosions from planes slamming into the World Trade Center towers on 9-11.

It leads into sequences of contemporary warfare -- including from the Middle East -- and then to the emotional aftermath in people's faces as they live through September 11th in New York City. Then we see more footage of current war scenes, and then the title screen.

Part I presents an educational journey through several religion's similarity in dealing with the astronomical procession of the constellations through distinct, 26,000-year periods by using allegorical references, like the well-known Jesus myth. The entire point of Part I is to shatter any tenuous connections one may have to claims of religious authenticity and religious authority by exposing the historical, pan-religious basis for common myths that are taken as givens in today's society. It opens with a popular appeal, the voiceover disdaining control from religious institutions but at the same time taking an agnostic position of not knowing if there is a god, and invoking an appeal to divine justice.

Part I ends with an intentionally abrupt clip of Tucker Carlson in attack mode, claiming that it is "blasphemous and sinful" to help others come to the conclusion that the U.S. killed 3,000 of its own citizens. This segues into Part II which deals entirely with the material evidence remaining from the events of 9-11.

Part III details a history of the construction of the financial underpinnings of the U.S. economy, including the financing of its wars of conquest. It uses clips from the movie "Network" (1976) that serve as an emotional, populist appeal for people to "wake up" and do something with their lives instead of being beholden to mass media. The theme continues in this vein of criticizing mass media, expanding outward to criticize the education system, entertainment, drugs, and also alcohol. It represents the entire news world with sequences from Fox News, showing shots of Rudy Giuliani, Rupert Murdoch, Paris Hilton, and a runway model.

This sorely constrained depiction of available news and the news-ingesting public leads into an over-reliance on temporally limited trends towards increasing political consolidation. These trends could last for only as long as the neoconservatives had political capital to spend. Political consolidation is a dynamic that parallels corporate mergers and acquisitions, and is possible only in a period of imperial military success, inevitably coupled with growing instability and desperation.

At the time that the documentary was being made this trend was already waning, and as of this writing the U.S. administration is suffering an incredible crisis of momentum, accompanied by financial crises that are threatening the capitalist mode of production worldwide.

The narrative points to the slightest of initiatives, the "North American Union", as our period's zeitgeist, which is also the movie's political thesis. While a fairly rational case could be made for plans for such a political consolidation, given the fall of the U.S. dollar, the rise of the Eurozone, and the implementation of NAFTA, what the authors fail to see is that both Mexico and Canada really don't have much to offer the U.S., not nearly to the degree that consolidating the powerhouse economies of Germany, France, and other European states have had for the European Union.

This faulty, nationalist premise serves as the basis for a trippy, paranoid path through the haunted house of "one world government" with RFID chips as the catalyst for overriding the free will of every single individual on the planet. Really the movie gets downright entertaining at this point, without even meaning to. The political horror movie springboards its antithesis, a call to personal salvation featuring a personal story of sudden awakening, including complementary sentiments of fuzzy, warm together-iness, also very "Crash" in its mode of thinking.

I have taken the liberty of reproducing the script at this point, for your enjoyment. I will take up some political themes which re-emerge at the conclusion, with my comments on them.

> [1:48:34] voiceover: In the end everybody will be locked into a monitored control grid where every single action you perform is documented, and if you get out of line they can just turn off your chip for at that point in time every single aspect of society will revolve around interactions with the chips.

> This is the picture that is painted for the future if you open your eyes to see it, a centralized, one-world economy where everyone's moves and everyone's transactions are tracked and monitored, all rights removed.

> The most incredible aspect of all: these totalitarian elements will not be forced upon the people, the people will demand them. For the social manipulation of society through the generation of fear and division has completely detached humans from their sense of power and reality, a process which has been going on for centuries if not millenia.

> Religion, patriotism, race, wealth, class, and every other form of arbitrary, separatist identification thus conceived has served to create a controlled population utterly malleable in the hands of the few. Divide and conquer is the motto and as long as people continue to see themselves as separate, from everything else, they lend themselves to being completely enslaved. The men behind the curtain know this, and they also know that if people ever realize the truth of their relationship to nature, and the truth of their personal power the entire manufactured zeitgeist they prey upon will collapse like a house of cards.

> [1:50:19] The whole system that we live in drills into us that we're powerless, that we're weak, that our society is evil, that it's privated [?}, et cetera, and so forth -- it's all a big fat lie. We are powerful, beautiful, extraordinary. There is no reason why we cannot understand who we truly are, where we are going. There is no reason why the average individual cannot be fully empowered. We are incredibly powerful beings.

> [1:50:51] I think I spent the first 30 years of my life -- the first 30 -- trying to become something. I wanted to become good at things -- I wanted to become good at tennis, I wanted to become good at school, at grades, and everything I kind of viewed in that perspective -- I'm not okay the way I am but if I got good at things -- I realized I had the game wrong. The game was to find out what I already was.

> [1:51:36] Now in our culture we've been trained for individual differences to stand out, so you look at each person and immediately it is brighter, dumber, older, younger, richer, poorer, and we make all these dimensional distinctions, put them in categories and treat them that way. And we get so that we only see others as separate from ourselves, in the ways that they're separate. And one of the dramatic characteristics of experience is being with another person and suddenly seeing the ways in which they're like you, not different from you. And experiencing the fact -- that which is essence in you and which is essence in me is indeed one -- the understanding that there is no other -- it is all one. And I wasn't born Richard Albert, I just was born as a human being. And then I learned this whole business of who I am, and whether I'm good or bad, or achieving or not -- all that's learned along the way.

> [1:52:45] text: When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace. - Sri Chimnoy Ghose

> [1:52:50] voiceover: The old appeals, to racial, sexual, religious chauvinism, to rabid nationalist fervor, are beginning not to work. A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed.

> [1:53:44] Bill Hicks used to finish his shows with this: "Life is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are, and the ride goes up and down and around and around, it has thrills and chills and it's very brightly colored. And it's very loud and it's fun for awhile -- some who have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question: Is this real or is this just a ride, and other people have remembered and they say, 'Hey, don't worry, don't be afraid ever, because this is just a ride,' and we kill those people. 'Shut him up, I've got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, my family. This has to be real.' It's just a ride. But we will kill those big guys who try to tell us that, and let the demons run amuck. But it doesn't matter because it's just a ride and we can change it anytime we want. It's only a choice -- no effort, no work, no job savings of money, it's just a choice, right now, between fear and love."

> [1:55:21] text: The Revolution is Now

The giveaway to any production's liberal political slant is when it starts admixing all of society's ills together, as "Zeitgeist" does with religion, patriotism, race, wealth, and class.

It doesn't note that the working class is the basis for the creation of all wealth, or that conditions become worse for the world's majority when the working class is repressed by the state. The social ills listed are far from arbitrary -- they are based in the very real strategies of the ruling class to divide the working class based on these arbitrary distinctions, so as to keep workers from organizing, thus keeping wages down.

In positing a trajectory toward "one world government" the authors are overly pessimistic by not noting the never-ending conflicts among nation-states, in competition for markets. By hinging future liberation from war on the realization of individual, personal enlightenment the authors are overly optimistic, because no matter how self-realized, well-educated, or fraternal people are it will not be sufficient as a plan for labor solidarity.

The personages "Zeitgeist" invokes are all liberals, who, when push comes to shove, are known for cutting deals with rulers, and selling out the working class in its hour of need. As much as I like Bill Hick's humor I can't consider him to be a serious political figure, nor will I ever view life as "a ride in an amusement park." If solving the world's class problem were as easy as loving everyone I would do it in a heartbeat -- unfortunately that's not enough for a true revolution against the barons of capital and their global machine.

Chris




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