It’s often been my lament that corporations should never have been granted personhood. it’s a ridiculous status for an entity that exists only to generate money in most cases (hoping of course that real patriotic citizens have SOME other considerations). Yet with the Edward Snowden whistle-blowing case and the government’s hypocrisies therein, I’ve come to a different conclusion: The problem is that corporations are granted RICH personhood.

Lawmakers like Diane Feinstein want Snowden prosecuted with a possible penalty of death, for leaking the details of the NSA’s ‘V For Vendetta’ policies: ” I don’t look at this as being a whistleblower. I think it’s an act of treason“  said Feinstein, who “told” the NSA to review its policies (a) as if she wasn’t aware of what the policies were already as the head of the Senate’s Intelligence Committee and (b) in the same wink-wink style as the DOJ’s “investigation” of banking  practices. What was treasonous here to Feinstein and others was betraying a corporation and corporate government’s crucial need for privacy. But what about the remainder of the country?  Normal citizens don’t want their data harvested.  They don’t want their emails – sent on supposedly secure servers – stored and read without probably cause, and they don’t want their phone calls recorded en masse “just in case”. If the American principles include the mantra “liberty or  death”, isn’t Snowden’s risking his safety for the liberty of others more in service to this country than anything Feinstein and the like have ever done?  The key: Snowden’s doing it for everyday citizens. So it doesn’t count.

Imagine if the CIA’s confirmed torturers were treated the same way Ohio kidnapper/torturer Ariel Castro has been (he faces 329 counts) . Instead, the man who exposed the CIA torture, John Kiriakou, was the only one jailed..  for betraying secrets.  See, intelligence community folks are protected by the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (2). Their privacy matters as they pretend to fight for a liberty that doesn’t actually exist. The reality? They fight for America’s corporate interests, so their right to torture is ascribed a higher calling (public interest) and goes on as per usual. When Castro does it it’s just “sick”.

If those people-corporations like Booz Allen are in fact just “people”, shouldn’t their information and movements be fair game for third party consumption like everyone else’s unless they “have something to hide”? No, leaking their practices gets you fired and potentially sentenced to death. If there are rules for culling information from citizenry, shouldn’t situations where there is too much culling or intentional abuse result in actual criminal prosecutions instead of just empty reprimands and policy reviews? No. Because these are the new nobility, our new infallible parents, telling us to do as they say and not as they do, while expecting us to be grateful for a safety and standard of living that they can’t be bothered to prove they’re responsible for.

Let’s be clear here, if you believe a single ranking politician who says, in the coming days, weeks, and months that they did not know the extent of the NSA’s snooping, you are the problem just as much as the partisan hacks in the entertainment industry who won’t make protest songs or TV shows treating Obama the same way they did when GW Bush put the Patriot Act into place to begin with (3)(4).

Predicted future quotes from Feinstein:
-This hurts the NSA more than it hurts the American people
-We’re proud to partner with Microsoft to sponsor government editions of the Xbox One, dubbed Hal 2013
-Finish your dinner

Love what I’m seeing from the next-gen consoles. Absolutely wasn’t going to opt-in if used games were off the table, but Sony seems to be addressing that as well as allowing some PS3 play (I own a lot of PS3 games). I compiled the best looking clips from all consoles, out of the bunch Tom Clancy’s new game ‘The Division’ was the shocker to me, and Watch Dogs still looks great. Hopefully ‘The Order’ has some more life to the humans than what we see in the trailer, but the costume design looks incredible.Everything in this playlist should have HD available, so make sure you’re playing at the highest quality possible.

Director/writer: Shane Carruth

Cast:
Amy Seimetz – Kris
Shane Carruth – Jeff
Andrew Sensenig – Sampler
Thiago Martins – Thief

Preamble: Two people are hypnotized with a new drug that renders the takers beholden to their controller. After being drained of their assets, both victims return to empty shells of their former lives and struggle for clarity. Plays like a much more competently executed version of Aronofsky’s ‘The Fountain’.

Plot Points: The hypnotizing agent used to drug both subjects seems to be incubated in pigs after passing through its human host. After this it seems to pass to flowers downstream from the sampler, only to be harvested again by the thief, which starts the cycle again.

The Meat:
‘Upstream Color’, Shane Carruth’s followup to 2004′s excellent ‘Primer’ has an interesting, if thin plot, certainly contrary to the extremely complex plot of its predecessor. It gives us one of the best examples of an organically unfolding mystery, there aren’t any easy answers and there are no magical Hollywood outcomes. The ethereal direction puts us in the same dreamlike state as the protagonists – Kris is especially sympathetic since we see the invasion of her entire life by this thief (Thiago Martins is outstanding in his search for an ideal victim) who uses his targets like puppets, harvesting from them and leaving without a trace. There is no chase for the unseen thief, most of the movie consists of the rebuilding process as two people adrift in the aftermath come together and stumble onto some truths.

This last point – the helplessness with which victims negotiate the aftermath of some traumatic event and the brutal loneliness that journey mostly entails -is the key to the love story here. The shared fight “upstream” against an overwhelming unseen enemy (both in physical location of the sampler and the parasite’s lingering presence in the recesses of their minds) is not painted nobly or with any shred of real stability. This is a desperate, flailing attempt at survival spurred largely by the simple instinct that something is wrong with them. The physical smallness of their violating agent is nothing compared to the smallness it makes them feel (“in the grand scheme of things..”), and this is only worsened by their un-explainable connection to the pigs which now hold their worms.

After Kris unknowingly drains her life savings – proven to her by the banks with surveillance photos – her and Shane eventually face the overwhelming emotion of losing their children due to the plight of their pig counterparts. None of it’s really happening TO them, doctors state matter-of-factly that she is not pregnant, but in the switchboard of the human brain her connection via the parasite makes it feel the same. Those are her emotions even if she’s had them foisted upon her.

The presence of Walden’s work is an interesting choice. Presuming there’s a particular reason for that selection, I’d assume that it speaks to the parasite-like power of an author’s relationship to his readers. Does anything invade the mind and transport the consumer like an engrossing literal passage? And what they are reading, Thoreau’s ‘Walden’, works perfectly for that. ‘Walden’ speaks to the existential nature of isolation and subsequent revelation, the power of being free from societal pressures not because of a hatred of people, but because of a drive towards pursuing the truth without clutter. And in the absolute mess that both of their lives have become, these passages break through just as they broke through Kris’ social programming to give her thief control over her mind.

Would Kris and Jeff even have found clarity without being able to recite Walden to each other? I felt this was unanswered, which is fine. When they do break through, though, it’s rewarding to see. No more arguing about whose childhood story is whose. After all the nature of memories isn’t all that accurate anyway, so what’s “theirs” was more of an impressionistic interpretation anyway. They instead begin agreeing on what truths there are about life itself. This is, in the end, something far more real to hold onto than what they may have considered their belongings before, things like those memories, or their standings at work or the valuable coins they’d had passed down to them.

Visually ‘Upstream Color’ is mostly excellent, it clips along nicely and the editing makes sure that it isn’t boring. The camerawork often drops focus at times where it was unnecessary, and I can’t help but think that non-digital shooting (or a different camera choice) would have looked better in several scenes. Carruth’s ear for naturalistic dialogue is intact, and he may be the best American example of how to tell a complex story without mind-numbing explainers, but the downside to this is that while always fascinating, there is very little of what I could classify as “enjoyment” to be gained from the movie. This is true all the way to the end, with what Kris sees as her redemption being completely misplaced. Whether or not that counts as a happy ending is up to you. After all she’s again oblivious to a truth, but you know what they say about ignorance being bliss (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and all that). Carruth’s score also deserves mention, it’s about as engrossing as anything I can remember since sitting through ‘There Will be Blood’ for the first time.

Movie – 9/10

Review by Steve Broome
sbroome at coalminds dot com
‘Upstream Color’ has just been added to Netflix instant, so check it out there when you get a chance.