The In-Crank-rial Revolution

Few can deny the myriad benefits that the new era of action hero has brought humanity. He generates nonstop kinetic energy, capable of powering our modern conveniences like Blu-ray players or Bit-torrents with loads of extra features. He boasts levels of emotional endurance capable of withstanding stresses unheard of when our heroes were merely carved out of wood or stone, His delivery of satisfaction, in pain or in pleasure, is instant and constant. The modern-day action hero is many times more productive than his forebears: he is in more scenes and set pieces, he completes them faster in many more, shorter cuts, he kills more bad guys in slow motion than his grandfathers did on 16mm – he crashes more cars, he has more sex – the Gross Action Product of our modern day heroes makes the founding fathers of the genre pale by comparison. And he has impeccably photoshopped abs.

But one must at some point wonder – does this transformation in the basic action hero come with a cost? Sure, injecting a man with a poison so that he constantly has to supply his body with adrenaline or he dies is a great way to increase efficiencies and improve the general welfare, but is there a hidden cost to the action heroes themselves?

Or to all of us?

The In-Crank-rial Revolution’s human toll, after the jump –

A New Rhythm with New Cruelties

Before the In-Crank-rial Revolution, there was a rhythm of life born out of centuries of trial and error, homespun wisdom, and handed-down convention. It had its problems – parasitic diseases were common, life expectancies were shorter (buddy cops often didn’t survive past their first sequel) – but it is easy to see why it was romanticized. The white hat and black hat stare at each other across a deserted Old West main drag – such a scene nowadays would require crane shots, CGI pictures of anatomy and periodic zooms out to Outer Space to see what satellites happen to be doing at the time.

Time was measured by the seasons. There was a season to discover the lead that gets you too close to the horrible truth, the season to turn in your badge and the gun and take mandatory paid leave until the case is over, the season to team up with your by-the-book partner to follow the paper trail to the abandoned warehouse, and of course, the season to harvest.

And of course, in such days, it was common for children to work alongside their elders in apprenticeships – the appearance of children in action movies was always alongside adults, where they would be brought up in the craft for many years before becoming, first journeymen, then masters themselves.

Nowadays, yes, children are capable of starring in their own action movies, where they are given robot suits or the power of flight, but certain of the finer social circles are beginning to doubt that an economy driven so much by children laboring in isolation is an improvement over their previous circumstances. Without the guidance and protection of hard-boiled cop/teacher/babysitters with surprisingly warm hearts, working conditions can become ghastly, and the children can be subjected to nonstop action set pieces, slide scenes, laser blasts – the sort of thing a child in days of yore would hardly have been forced to encounter unironically.

The Great Migrations

In search of these In-Crank-rial jobs, thousands of aspiring heroes and heels have also left their ancestral backlot studios and migrated to new concentrated populations – leaving their old plywood ghost towns looking like plywood ghost towns. New Zealand, Vancouver, Hong Kong – even places like Boston, Massachusetts – a Hellhole to an action star, what with its bland, salty food, creamy fish soups and a subway that closes at 12:30 – become the home of more loose cannons with every passing day.

Hollywood Cinema is no longer a thing of Hollywood – and the generations who rolled in those hills may soon see them less as the center of the entertainment world and more as the subject of pastorale – eclogues of shepherds tending to their flocks by transforming suburban dads into shaggy dogs.

In one extreme example, 400,000 orcs and mummified skeletons have taken up mutual residence in a single silicone tenement at Industrial Light & Magic roughly the size of a shoebox.

The Factory Farms

Certainly, past periods of innovation and upheaval have led to new ways to “feed the beast.” The old serials, Tarzan, the studio system – each were improvements on how the work done by human beings provided food for the all-consuming moviewatcher.

And certainly now, with our minute segmentation, extreme focus grouping, remaking, reshooting, rebooting and sequel after sequel – where new movies are but old movies meeting other old movies – where performances are on the verge of being generated from stock footage and AutoCad – where risk aversion has heightened to such a degree that the boldest, most surprising hit of the summer was an expansion/remake produced by the director of some of history’s highest-grossing big budget tentpoles, and its second most surprising hit was the third sequel to a franchise that has always been commercially viable – that these were surprises, shocks – certainly the Hollywood monoculture offers yield, certainly it provides a new magnitude of nourishment, but might it not have unforseen effects on nutrition? Might its product be less satisfying?

And think of what it does to the poor beasts who munch away on cereals and antibiotics, their stomachs bloated, confined to tiny boxes with nothing to do all day but fart, grunt, chew and hope to not get an infection as their stomachs fill with acid and their legs become useless . . .

. . . think of the poor Hollywood screenwriters!

Mass Production

And as human labor is commodified and systematized, taken from the land and the studio and the workshop and put in the computers and the marketing groups and the demographic-dominated projects, does this not do something to our dignity? Does not the mass production of movies take something away from us?

The miasma of mass production is disruptive to the formal relationship between a man’s mind and his craft. As much as it brings us wealth, it cheapens us, and as much as it gives us liberty, it wipes away the texture of many of the places we might go.

For all the wonders Henry Ford offered the world, I can’t help but remember his extreme beliefs on how human beings ought to spend their lives, and the famous quotation that he first said to Snoop Dogg when he pitched him a role in Soul Plane:

“You can fly a plane in any kind of movie, as long as it’s black.”

Chev Chelios, the Jurgis Rudkus of the Hollywood Stockyard

Jurgis Rudkus is the hero of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle – he’s a strapping, strong-willed Lithuanian who just tries to do his job, but he and his family are subjected to cruel, absurd abuse after cruel absurd abuse until it drives him to extremes – joining a socialist movement.

Chev Chelios, the hero of Crank and Crank 2: High Voltage is the strapping, strong-willed Englishman who just tries to do his job, but he and his girlfriend are subjected to cruel, absurd abuse after cruel absurd abuse until it drives him to entirely different extremes.

Industrialization and commodification of people – breaking down cogent groups into their component parts and optimizing them for maximum efficiency, always carries with it the tremendous capacity for abusing human dignity. Crank and Crank 2 are the sly, tongue in cheek fulfillments of this commodification – the optimization of the action movie. The reality is semi-mechanized, the set pieces swallow up reality, the action is overblown to the point of madness, and through all of it, the main point, the motivating force behind all of it, is that Chev Chelios is being subjected to just tremendous physical and emotional abuse to the point where his world melts into an inhuman, surrealistic madness.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMPwFHiyQdk

If only he could have joined some sort of labor union for hit men with electric hearts . . .

“The cup of iniquity is full, the grapes of wrath are ripe, and now God crushes them in awesome judgment. Those who have rejected His grace feel the terror of His wrath.”