Amidst resurgent fascisms and cut-throat
neoliberal reforms across the globe, one would not be blamed for giving up on
satire. ICE detention centres, spiralling homelessness, migrant
slave labour: what use is laughter, parody and irony here? One can’t help
but watch shows like Last Week Tonight,
Have I Got News For You, or The Daily Show and feel they are
completely toothless: an embarrassing and transparent charade of opposition
which in actuality shore up the dominant powers. [1]
Chris Morris’ Channel 4 interview last
month, promoting his new film The Day
Shall Come, however, has breathed new life into this debate. In a widely
shared clip, Morris poured scorn on “a kind of satire which essentially
placates the court”, authoritatively advocating for a comedy with “a purpose”
that actively tries to change something. With a refreshing moral seriousness
and clarity of ambition, Morris affirmed that he did not feel outflanked by the
perpetual outlandishness of world politics today and the likes of Trump,
asserting that “yeah, you need to take notes pretty fast right now, but I don’t
think [Trump’s] escaped ridicule … you’re always going to be able to ridicule
someone like that”. Satire’s not dead, for Morris; it’s just being done wrong. A firm commitment to satire as a weapon
undergirds Morris’ interview; he doesn’t care that Trump is outlandish, because
he knows that reality has always been outlandish, and that comedy intervenes in
that (rather than operating separately as the work of the individual author’s
imagination). “It’s about the thrust, and it’s really about whether the people
you’re lancing can get off your spike”, he declares. “And I’m saying the FBI
really cannot get out of the tractor beam of this comedy.”
The question is: is Morris’ faith
misplaced? Does The Day Shall Come
embody a revived and weaponised satire for our current times? Or does the lance
dissolve upon contact? Is the lancer always-already themselves lanced? Do those
in power want to be lanced? Do resurgent fascisms, neoliberal exploitation and
state authoritarianism demand other modes of politico-aesthetic resistance?
*
But “fake” is the wrong word for
these schemes, because as their victims will attest to, and as The Day Shall Come painstakingly
portrays, their impact on those targeted is very, very real. Such stings have an almost 100% conviction rate according to
Morris, with prison sentences of 25+ years which break apart innocent families.
The FBI’s retort here would be that these people would have been terrorists
anyway; these stings are just a form of pre-emptive policing that catch
criminals before the crime. But from the moment the authorities “pre-emptively”
engage with those they have identified as possible terrorists, and modulate
their behaviour based on pre-existing plans for entrapment, any declaration
that “they would have been terrorists anyway” becomes literally impossible to
confirm or deny. The authorities never gain any grip on what these suspects are
“really” like because as soon as they have been flagged as a target, and as
soon as an undercover informant approaches them, the suspect has been coaxed
into an elaborate simulation of reality. A non-simulated, or authentically
“real”, response from the suspect can’t be attained; they’re always-already in
the game of the simulation for the FBI, always-already being tested, nudged and
probed, and any response can only be understood in relation to this. Here the
distance and ontological hierarchisation between fiction and reality disappears
as the racist and classist models of “radicalisation” and what a “terrorist”
looks and/or acts like pass into, perforate and affect the Real, rather than
simply “reflect” or “model” it from a distance. As cultural theorist Jean
Baudrillard prophesised in 1976:
The old slogan 'reality is stranger
than fiction' … has been outrun, since there is no longer any fiction that life
can possibly confront, even as its conqueror. Reality has passed completely into the game of reality. Radical
disaffection, the cool and cybernetic stage, replaces the hot, phantasmatic
phase. [2]
These terrorist plots, then,
aren’t “fake” or “false”; but they’re also not simplistically “real”, either.
Instead, they’re simulations, a
strange kind of “game” of reality [3].
The powers that be such as the FBI will always officially efface this, needing
the firm ontological terrain of the Real in order to ground and legitimate
themselves, but the fact is no such terrain exists.
If this all sounds like a
stretch, or needlessly abstract and “postmodern”, I’d recommend watching The Day Shall Come, which brilliantly depicts
the sheer absurdity, unreality and weightlessness stalking underneath these
terror stings. The film follows Moses (Merchánt Davis), an impoverished leader
of a small religious commune, the “Star of Six”, in Miami. Worshipping an
eclectic mix of six deities (Allah, Melchizedek, Jesus, “Black Santa”, Mohammed
and General Toussaint), Moses preaches a black revolution against the white
man, but strictly without the use of firearms. “We trust only the weapons of
tradition”, Moses declares in a sermon. “The sword, the sling… and the
crossbow.”
Following the failure of a
previous sting, the FBI seek out new suspects who can be the centre of their
simulated terror plots. Moses, preaching to “overthrow the injustice of the
white European” and declaring that “the cranes of the gentrificators shall
fall”, seems just the fit for them, and soon enough informants are in contact
with Moses, with one promising him money and firearms while posing as a sheikh
affiliated with Al-Qaeda.
After this initial point of
contact everything spirals out of control as each side tries to play and
deceive the other in an escalating game of reality (sometimes without even
realising it, in Moses’ case). The result is the fabulously absurd climax of
the film, which starts when Moses agrees to purchase uranium from the FBI
informant. Unkeen to actually use the nuclear weapons, however, the Star of Six
fill the empty nuclear cannisters with piss and beans (the actual uranium being
given to them the next week), in order to sell them for $100,000 to a neo-Nazi
group and thus get some much needed cash for their farm. The neo-Nazis,
however, are undercover Miami police officers, and having been promised
supposedly real nuclear weapons, prompt the police department to declare a
nuclear emergency. A team of police officers are on their way to arrest Moses
and the Star of Six for supplying nuclear weapons that are in reality piss and
beans inside cannisters supplied by the FBI. Having compromised their simulated
nuclear terror plot and taken it as a real threat, the police and FBI soon butt
heads, and the latter rush to diffuse the situation and regain control of
“their” simulation. Hurriedly, they find the phone numbers for the “neo-Nazis”
and get them to call off the arrest, letting Moses and the Star of Six go.
The FBI think they’ve solved the
problem, but soon find out their efforts have been futile: word of the
situation has reached the Oval Office, causing the Department of Homeland
Security to declare a federal nuclear emergency on the fake piss-nukes. Dozens
of police cars and armed police officers are now following Moses, unbeknownst to
him, as he travels to his daughter’s birthday party. The fiction, once again,
has outpaced reality. Faced with this farcical scenario, the FBI agents find
themselves conforming to a twisted, backwards logic. They know the emergency is
groundless, but it’s out there and believed, so in order to control it they
have to act as if it were genuine. The
bemused FBI agent Kendra (Anna Kendrick) summarises the quandary as follows:
“So… to stop a nuclear emergency I
have to declare a nuclear emergency?” “Yes”, her boss replies. “The logic only
works if you say the sentence slowly.
Keep the contradictory elements apart.”
As the cybernetic feedback loop(s)
between Moses, the FBI and the police in The
Day Shall Come accelerates, then, any firm ontological grounding or
hierarchisation crumbles. What was simply designed as a fictitious threat to
fool a supposed “would be” terrorist becomes taken as a real threat by a paranoid agency of social control that, operating
under pre-emptive and anticipative models of terrorist behaviour, understands
and respects no difference between signifier and signified and takes any sign of a real threat as a real threat
in itself. The code, the programme, the model, the operation, is coldly literal; it seeks pure operativity and
functionality, not symbolism and metaphors. The results here are dark and disturbing:
the Star of Six are all sentenced to 25-35 years in prison, the same outcome as
if they had actually committed a terrorist plot without any external
intervention.
Try and start on any firm
division between reality and fiction here, and you’ll end up precisely where
everyone in The Day Shall Come ends
up: in a strange blend of reality and fiction – in other words, a play of
simulations; Baudrillard’s hyperreality.
Dig for any firm reality principle and you’ll come up short, inevitably finding
the absurd circuitry behind the screen, as the FBI agents in the film find themselves
enmeshed in. It’s all like that Baudrillard passage from Simulacra and Simulation:
Organize a fake holdup. Verify that
your weapons are harmless, and take the most trustworthy hostage, so that no
human life will be in danger [...] You won't be able to do it: the network of
artificial signs will become inextricably mixed up with real elements (a policeman
will really fire on sight; a client of the bank will faint and die of a heart
attack […]), in short, you will
immediately find yourself once again, without wishing it, in the real, one
of whose functions is precisely to devour any attempt at simulation, to reduce
everything to the real - that is, to the established order itself… [4]
But we don’t really “find
ourselves back in the real” after these encounters, as the Star of Six at the
end of The Day Shall Come would
attest to. The absurd circuitry, the weightlessness, the simulation, has been
exposed, and things aren’t quite the same afterwards. As the film ends and the
credits roll, it haunts us. This
shouldn’t have happened, but it did, and it does. We never find the “truth”
in The Day Shall Come, we never
return to any stable ontological ground, what “actually” happened never gets
its comeuppance. The simulation just keeps on going as (if) real; we never get
back to the “real” side of the mirror, and to be honest we were never there to
begin with. Instead, we encounter what Mark Fisher in his PhD thesis Flatline Constructs, borrowing from William Gibson’s Neuromancer, terms the “black mirror”:
But what then does the black mirror
show us, if not out own reflections? In part, the black mirror is another image
of cyberspace black out – the catatonic “neuro-electronic void” or cut-out of
conscious signal we have already discussed […] The black mirror, then, is the
image of the noumenal event horizon beyond which we cannot go: what we “always”
are “in the other world” we are “already” in. [5]
The black mirror haunts the
arrest and severe sentencing of Moses and the Star of Six at the end of The Day Shall Come; it’s right there, in
that uncomfortable feeling in our stomachs. The image was never a mirror(ing);
it was always a simulation, the workings of a code… sure, this is probably
something to embrace ultimately rather than deny – more on this in part 2 – but
who can deny the unease one gets when one looks in the mirror and just sees black,
when one thinks they can trust what they see before them, only to end up with
35 years in prison on cooked-up terrorism charges for it…
*
The Day Shall Come is a good satire of this weightless yet
pernicious form of power – interesting, funny, morally serious. And yet,
considering how deeply director Chris Morris understands this operation of
power (spending
years researching the film, interviewing FBI agents and victims), one
wonders why he opted for satire as a
politico-aesthetic mode to combat it. For doesn’t satire fall prey to the
simulation, just as Moses does in The Day
Shall Come? Ultimately, isn’t a satire on “fake” FBI terror strings just a simulation of them that will all too quickly
be absorbed into the real, absorbed into the FBI (and other state agencies’)
very functioning? If so, what does resistance look like? I’ll be discussing
this more in part 2, which should be up at least within a few weeks or so.
[1] Mark Fisher’s “The strange death of British satire” is an excellent and succinct documentary of this trend. Available at: https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/4919/the-strange-death-of-british-satire
[2] Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, p.75, emphasis added. (SAGE, 1993)
[3] It’s important to underscore that this doesn’t mean the racist and classist
violence inflicted in these simulations is fake or “not real”, and thus
unimportant. It’s not that reality is now fake, but that reality is
increasingly fictional and fiction is increasingly real. The status of both
“reality” and “fiction” have changed, blurring into one another. Reality is no
longer what we think it is; same with fiction. But that doesn’t mean the real
has disappeared and that everything is fake – this would be a crucial
misreading of Baudrillard’s arguments.
[4] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (no page numbers as I have a shitty pdf version) (emphasis added)
[5] Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs, p.142. (Exmilitary Press edition)
