The fortnight of Fairtrade is very much upon us, and if you happen to be at Imperial, well, you’ve already missed a bunch of events followed by free coffee and tea. Sucks to be you. Never fear though, there’s a Cheese and Wine evening from 7pm on Thursday the 5th, to be held in Huxley 344, and you can buy your ticket online.
I have to say I’ve personally started to get interested in the whole Fairtrade thing, because quite frankly, global capitalism has done a damned good job of screwing things up, and something needs to be done. As anybody who regularly reads my blog (all 5 of you!) will know, I’ve recently been reading Marx & Engel’s Communist Manifesto, and so my mind has been bent on these kind of thoughts for a while and the same patterns show through.
The exploitation of the Have-nots by the Haves continues as ever, on a greater scale than ever before. It’s sick crap legitimised by a squalid ideology: the mythology of the invisible hand of the market, turning individual greed into collective benefit; terrible wishful thinking which props up this corrupt system.
The theory is supply and demand – if the price drops too low to make something economical to produce, people will stop making that product, supply will drop, and the price will increase until a stable equilibrium is reached; notionally a fair price for everyone concerned.
The fault in this is pointed out by Marx in the Manifesto; this equilibrium, in our era of mass production and global movement of goods, in which another producer will always be desperate enough to sell for less, will be the absolute minimum price at which it is possible for the producer to continue to be alive.
Let me stress this; not healthy, not educated, not able to provide healthcare, nor support relatives – simply alive. How these people are expected to be able to lift themselves out of poverty and improve their lot is utterly beyond me.
This is neglecting the other distorting influences and things stacked against the producers in the third world – farming subsidies in the developed world, the conglomerate power of the multinationals, the fact that the very poorest are unable to switch their production easily from one thing to another because they don’t have the capital necessary to do so. Nor can they do what the oppressed have done for centuries, and simply burn their oppressors out. This isn’t 18th Century France we’re talking about here – the oppressor is the entire Western capitalist system. It’s an enemy, an oppressor, of incalculable power.
Fairtrade isn’t a complete solution to this problem, nor could it be. Social change on the sort of scale needed is… well, big. Huge. But even the longest journey begins with a single step, and paying farmers a bit more than the absolute minimum so they can start to afford to send their kids to school is a damned good start.
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Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
So as you may guess from the title, I’ve been to see Watchmen. “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” is often translated as “Who watches the watchmen?” but it doesn’t mean watch in a passive sense; it means guard, protect, watch over, which makes writing an answer to that question in Latin actually pretty tricky. If I wrote “custodes custodio” (“I watch the watchmen”) it would actually be wrong, in a literal sense, and “custodes specto” just doesn’t flow as well. Yes, I do realise I’m a huge nerd.
Anyways, the film was staggeringly faithful to the original. There are bits omitted (what, no pirates‽) and some things modified (what, no squid‽) and some things I think added (what, so much Nixon‽) but for the most part the original is incredibly recognisable. The bravery on display at bringing a film of this sort of magnitude to the screen with 80’s setting and blue penis intact is frankly pretty astonishing, and I’m amazed it got made at all. As an adaptation, it’s pretty much the best that could possibly be done. Also, I think the new ending might actually better, which I’m fairly sure will get me burned at the stake.
But… I’m not entirely convinced it holds together as a film in its own right. I don’t know if I’m coloured by my foreknowledge of the source material, but Alan Moore is absolutely right in some of his criticisms of film as a medium:
You can experience time in the story as non-linearly as Dr Manhattan, flicking backwards and forwards to piece together the story, halt a moment to piece together the motivations, the thoughts, appreciate the detail. In film, you’re slaved to the will of the director. If he wants to spend moments lingering over two characters having surprisingly graphic sex, then so do you, like it or not.
Then there’s the fact that you can feel the artefacts of Watchmen’s origins showing up in the film’s plot. The film feels segmented, because the original story was published as individual comic issues. The film goes from being an examination of the Comedian, to the origin of Dr Manhattan, to the identity of Rorschach (which they far too clearly alluded to in the film, I preferred the genuine shock of the original) with seemingly little rhyme or reason. It feels jarring against the medium.
This isn’t to say it isn’t a good film, because it is, and many individual facets of it are brilliant, but it doesn’t entirely come together in its own right.
I’m not a film critic, so I don’t have any particularly focussed comment, but here’s my advice: grab a copy of the graphic novel, you won’t be disappointed.
Tags: film, latin, Moore, Watchmen