- Also Known As:
- Man Bites Dog; It Happened in Your Neighborhood
- Year:
- 1992
- Country:
- Belgium
- Predominant Genre:
- Crime
- Directors:
- Rémy Belvaux André Bonzel Benoît Poelvoorde
- Best Performances:
- None.
- Premiss:
- Film crew follows a ruthless thief and heartless killer as he goes about his daily routine: Complications set in when the film crew lose their objectivity and begin lending a hand.
- Themes:
- Guilt | Political Correctness | Totalitarianism | White culture | White supremacy
- Similar (in Plot, Theme or Style) to:
- Natural Born Killers
- Review Format:
- DVD
Clever satire on the White media’s ongoing love affair with trashy people. The media’s inability to balance its reporting with talk about anything good makes its lack of contextual objectivity clear - as well as its political agenda to pretend that its cynicism and paranoia about human nature is justified. Here, the purpose of the media is mere reportage (as it should be) unrelated to the alleged functions of the so-called Fourth Estate - but the reportage focuses obsessively on the nasty and the unpleasant (as it actually is).
The murderers are always remembered, the victims are always forgotten in a media world of upside-down moral priorities: A media culture that brings out the worst in people by never offering an incentive to be much else. It makes similar points to Natural Born Killers but in a more direct and audience-implicating manner. there are, in fact, no sympathetic characters here - just the film itself. the rough-and-ready black-and-white documentary style of the movie serves its satirical purpose well in carefully mimicking a tv documentary; without plot.
This foregrounding of perpetrators over victims exemplifies a media culture complicit in much of the world’s evil; seeking to evade guilt and responsibility by siding with evildoers in the hope of coming to some kind of accommodation with the evil. This reveals the self-serving hypocrisy of pretending to condemn wrongdoing while self-indulgently wallowing in it and, ultimately, becoming an accessory to it by encouraging it. Getting used to the smell of death so as not to be aware of it and, thus, never having to see the need to improve what is made to seem natural and unchangeable. A complicity,moreover, that completely undermines any genuine claim of media objectivity.
By claiming that human nature is essentially depraved - as in the Catholic Communion - the person who believes this can both hide and justify their own depravity. such claims are political propaganda not metaphysical reality.
The White media is amoral but, unlike Western science, does not admit it - nor does it admit to the implications of its perennial fear of ethics; while pretending to possess a moral purpose. A subjective media where all concerned clearly state their prejudices would be an improvement upon one that claims those biases do not exist.
In many ways - despite some amateurishness in the execution - quite a brilliant and deliberately nasty film about a deliberately nasty culture.
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