the cutting room

Some movies are like events that happen on the socio-cultural landscape. They “go off” and you can observe their effect through time as ripples of influence. I am in the middle of watching a very depressing documentary about the excellence of the labor force that is being developed in India. To quote my wife: “Man, we don’t have shit to offer the world…” Beg to differ, my love. Witness Damian, an operations manager at Office Tiger (one of India’s foremost outsourced US labor companies), age 27. When asked to explain what it’s like at Office Tiger, he pauses a moment to reflect and says in a thick Hindi drawl “It’s like when Laurence Fishburne says to Keanu Reeves in the Matrix… ‘I cannot tell you what the Matrix is. You have to experience the Matrix for yourself’ ” The Matrix is everything we don’t yet understand. Wherever there is the possibility of duality… “Is it day or night? Black or white? Alive or dead? The past or the future? Am I awake or asleep? Is this heaven or hell? Real or unreal?”… the Matrix gives us a universal metaphor with which to consider our fate as souls. The Roman Empire may be in a precipitous decline, but we are still the most important authors of content in the world. Damian wants to be Keanu Reeves, and so long as that is true, America’s (California’s) power should not be entirely discounted. Our only real competitor for the airwaves is Japan.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 30th, 2006 at 4:32 pm and is filed under Film in Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.