Starsuckers

Starsuckers is a film by the same chap who made the excellent Taking Liberties. I thoroughly recommend the latter film; it is the type of piece that can make you very angry at just how our civil liberties have been frankly shat on under the utterly spurious idea of the "War on Terror". However, Starsuckers is different. It's a film about the manipulation of the media by corporations to sell products, and about the lack of balance against the messages proposed by these corporations. It is also about how celebrities have devalued democracy, and the dangerous implications of what happens when celebrities become experts.

As a result, it isn't a very good film. For several reasons.

Firstly, the director was railing against the lack of balance against the messages protrayed in the media by large corporations by... making a deeply unbalanced film. The director's (for he was at the screening and took questions after the film) argument that if people wanted balance then they could just go and read the mainstream media did not stand up to close scrutiny. If you want balance in journalism, then you should lead by example and create balance in your own work. Starsuckers isn't balanced at all; it a furious polemic. Don't get me wrong, I've nothing against furious polemics - this blog is full of them - but you shouldn't attempt to claim such polemics as journalism or anything other than biased commentary on the modern world. It is counter-intuitive to the point of stupidity to make a completely unbalanced film about the lack of balance.

Secondly, the film also made a lot out of the fact that newspapers would print unsubstantiated - or to put it more brutally, made up - stories. Which would be more shocking if we weren't talking about the tabloid end of the newspaper world and if the stories concerned weren't minor ones about celebrities. So what if the newspaper managed to get stories about Guy Ritchie juggling and Sarah Harding reading quantum physics into the gossip columns of tabloid newspapers? These stories hardly change the world; in fact, you forget about them as soon as you have read them (if you are interested enough to read them in the first place). I'd be far more inclined to be worried - and, indeed, interested - if these were the front page stories of reputable newspapers being made-up and phoned in. Unfortunately, they weren't. And it doesn't follow that stories printed as gossip in trashy sections of trashy tabloids being faked means that the major news stories in better newspapers are faked as well. The film seemed almost inclined to dismiss all journalism based on the actions of some gossip columnists writing largely irrelevant stories.

Furthermore, the whole thing felt like the content of the film - that corporations want to make money from you and will try to manipulate you in the process - was meant to be a massive revelation. And, of course, it really isn't. I've known about this for about as long as I can remember. I know there is bias in the media, and I deal with it. Nothing in this film actually surprised me beyond the apparent naivete of the production team, since all of this seemed to be coming as a total surprise to them.

Let's take an example. The film presented a negative side to both Live Aid and Live 8, and expected me to be surprised that the events weren't both total successes. Sorry, guys, but I don't really remember a time when I didn't think that both events were deeply flawed to the point of being worthless. The director's assertion that Geldof's version of the events - that both were resounding successes - has largely been unchallenged is simply not true. You can find alternative voices to the mainstream media. You just have to go and look for them.

Which leads me nicely to my main objection to the film. It seemed to suggest that we were all dumb and unable to work out these tricks of manipulation for ourselves. In some respects, it took an almost typically left-wing view that people as a whole need a wiser person to point out the reality of the world to them. Perhaps I'm being naive, but I have a greater faith in the intellectual capacities of most people. I think they will see through the lies, manipulations and distortions presented by some media outlets, and understand why those distortions occur. They will also understand that a celebrity is far less likely to have anything meaningful to say on many subjects than an expert in that field. We don't need a film like Starsuckers to point this out to us.

And this is the film's biggest problem - it comes across as patronising. It states the bleedin' obvious like it should be a complete surprise to us, and then expects us to swoon in awe-struck admiration at these crushingly self-apparent revelations. It almost seems to think that we're all too stupid to understand the world around us. I don't think that's true. But the upshot is we end up with a deeply cynical film that believes itself to be far more impressive and important than it actually is, or is ever likely to be.