Here are excerpts from media studies professor Dion Dennis' detailed essay about the digital video "USA The Movie" from a postmodernist perspective. He gets it:
"Immediately across a narrow street from Ground Zero is a 1920’s building with eleven stories, 114 Liberty Street. Undergoing a second renovation since 9/11, each of the nine full-length windows on the eleventh floor had been commandeered to deliver a large and clearly visible statement. From the left-window-to-the-right, the message was as follows: The first three windows declared “NO MORE WARS, NO MORE WARS.” In the three central windows were peace signs. The remaining three windows flanked the sixties symbol with the admonition to tell “NO MORE LIES, NO MORE LIES.” It was a bold condemnation of the moral bankruptcy and violence of Bush’s Iraqi war and occupation, and a strident plea that the Iraqi campaign should not serve as a progenitor for a 21st Century extension of 20th Century geo-politics, the politics of endless, infinite war.
That is the basic, overt message of the underground, independent film, “USA the Movie.” But, within the film, the message is analogous to the opening and closing notes of a symphony, or the frequent repetition of a motif. It provides a basic coherence. But, as Barthes might say, the film is not a “readerly text.” In fact, it is largely a Deleuzian film, with direct and indirect references to the war machine, capitalism, ideology, religion, the state and nomadism. Like Milleu Plateaux, the narrative frame eschews temporality and discursive linearity in favor of time, place and identity bending. Filmed between 9/11 and the beginning of the Iraqi invasion, it’s a unique film, rhizomic in its structure, nomadic in its movement. As a document that is part contemporary history, part biography, part morality play, and part allegory, “USA the Movie” is arguably a significant exploration of “the American” as Deleuzian nomad, and the relationship between American nomadism, capitalism and the global war machine.
..“USA the Movie” is emotionally intense, intellectually intriguing and profoundly disturbing, in surprising and unconventional ways. These qualities are the result of how its intertextual visual and auditory messages are composed. The film has an intermittently non-linear narrative structure. At some points, specific narratives emerge out of the darkness of midnight into an elliptical exposition that elliptically unfolds within a counterclockwise temporality. A significant number of motifs/images iterate, often deliberately breaking with conventional narrative frames and expectations, and away from Barthes’ “readerly text.”
In thinking about the film’s structure and rhythm, and about its intentions, Deleuze’s characterizations of the rhizome seem most appropriate:
[A Film] is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the world, there is an aparallel evolution of [film] and the world . . . Always follow the rhizome by rupture; [rhizomes] lengthen, prolong, and relay the line of flight; mak[ing] it vary . . . The rhizome is a map and not a tracing . . . open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. . .conceived as a work of art, and constructed as a political action . . . The coordinates are determined . . . by a pragmatics [of] composing multiplicities or aggregates of intensities . . . The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots . . . [and contains] multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight.
“USA the Movie” is in a rhizomic relationship with USA, the political and cultural entity, open and connectable in all of its dimension, operating through variation, expansion and offshoots that constitute, as Deleuze and Guattari say, specific lines of flight."
The website for the DVD is www.usathemovie.com and/or www.manticeye.com
Prof. Dennis' full essay originally published in Rhizomes.net (not Rhizomes.org) can be accessed on the USA The Movie site.
