- Also Known As:
- Unknown
- Year:
- 2012
- Country:
- Predominant Genre:
- Drama
- Director:
- Outstanding Performances:
- None
- Premiss:
- Naval veteran arrives home from war unsettled and uncertain of his future - until tantalized by a charismatic cult leader.
- Themes:
- Alienation
- Coming-of-age
- Corporate Power
- Destiny
- Emotional repression
- Family
- God
- Identity
- Individualism
- Loneliness
- Loyalty
- Materialism
- Narcissism
- Nostalgia
- Personal
- Political
- Political Correctness
- Pornography
- Sexism
- Sexual Repression
- Schizophrenia
- Social class
- Snobbery
- Solipsism
- Stereotyping
- White culture
- White guilt
- White supremacy
- Similar to:
- Unknown
- Review Format:
- DVD
Landless Latitudes
Summary: Caucasian culture and its adherents.
Clever movie about White demagoguery and its antecedents: Emotional repression, White supremacy & the belief that Whites are not a part of the animal kingdom, but part of something higher, something more god-like.
The schizophrenia of such a cultural position is highlighted by people who imagine the world rather than actually see it - and their place in it - clearly. The lack of a substantive White culture creates the needs for wars-of-aggression and heterosexism as a substitute for anything that would enable a strong sense of individual identity to assert and maintain itself; hence, the fruitless search for masters to tell Whites what to do (eg, Churchill, Freud, Hitler, etc). This evading of personal responsibility suggests White culture is, itself, no more than an Aryan supremacist cult with no genuine desire to resolve its inherent contradictions; making these self-perpetuating in merely swapping one form of psychological tyranny for another - as White fashions dictate.
Here, the White cult is only partially revealed as fraudulent - with the alleged secrets of happiness concealed behind mysticism and flim-flam, while Whites pantomime their personalities to deceive themselves they are the masters everyone else should follow. Trying to achieve the admiration of the crowd, to compensate for the absence of compelling personal relationships, results in the best “actors” looking down their noses at those less able to fake existence; that is, the more honest. The anger the energy wasted in such pretense produces leads to the inevitably-violent and escapist nature of White lives (as outlined by Thoreau).
The usual White solution to White existential problems (bombing people) is never explicitly shown, but its negative affect on Whites clearly is: Confusing sex with violence and sex-obsession with the emotional intimacy that could achieve the self-knowledge that would allow personal goals to be both set and achieved. Thus, White wars of aggression are designed as libido-releasing purges of innate animality that end-up causing more problems than they pretend to solve.
Typical of this director’s work, the basic theme, here, is cultural malaise; presented with great style and some committed acting, but without the ability to rise above his own material to present fully-developed and ruthlessly-explored characters. Whites are, thus, trapped by a culture that admits of none other being their equal (or superior), so they just assume being miserable is natural and normal. Either that, or accept the unpalatable truth that White culture is just as inevitably-flawed - if not more so - than anyone else’s.
All this clearly suggests that, underneath everything on display here, there is little more than pretentious twaddle gasping for air in an oxygen-depleted environment where practical, real-world solutions are being conscientiously-objected to. Indeed, the film offers no viable solution to the problems outlined; suggesting it is more a psycho-therapeutic exercise for its makers - and its intended White audience - than it is a way out of the psychological morass that we witness in some detail.
Everyone does, indeed, serve some master or other, but the only ones here are cultists who easily-ensnare lonely, goal-less drifters. If this movie were more solidly-based upon objective reality, then a true masterpiece could have been fashioned from such unedifying material - rather than just a brilliantly-staged exposé of White ennui.
