Valkyrie

I think I am the only person I know who is excited about this movie.



It's about a conspiracy to do something good, which is pretty rare I think. I can't think of any others. Tom Cruise wears an I patch. I don't really care to find out whether that is based on history or not. I've been called "Tom Cruise" by black kids in Brooklyn on two occasions. I don't think I look like him, so I think they're trying to say something else. Also, the whole movie is in English, which seems really weird, but I guess it's for Americans. What is that called? Authenticity?

Here's a picture a took on my new cell phone that has a camera in it while driving out of New York today:

I doubt that I will actually see Valkyrie in theatres, or write a follow up to this, but you never know. If you click on the image to enlarge it you will see the sentence that contains the word "conspiracy" which precipitated this post.

WTC 7

Last week, the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology released a 77-page report on the collapse of the World Trade Center Building 7, which you can read here. As you might imagine the report is pretty boring, but some of the language used is pretty interesting. There is a pretty subjective "reconstruction" of the events that lead to the collapse on 9/11, and some different explanations for why certain scenarios are more likely that others, blah blah blah. But what's interesting is to compare they're language with the language used by the New York Daily News story that covers the report. The NIST report, which took three years to write, explains its purpose as an attempt to understand the safety problems that caused the building to collapse, without acknowledging the importance of an official report to quell any conspiracy theories about 9/11. The Daily News makes the implicit assumption that the reports only purpose is to debunk any theories, as we can tell from the headline, "Fire - not explosives - brought 7 WTC down."

9/11 conspiracy theorists believe that the official explanation that fires caused structural damage that ultimately led to the collapse of all three WTC buildings is physically impossible. In all of the 9/11 videos and media, you will hear pseudo-scientific explanations of why this is so, using evidence like "no building in history has collapsed because of fire damage" and videos of controlled demolitions which closely resemble the building 7 collapse. This is part of the narrative strategy of conspiracy theories, using "evidence" that may have no basis in reality, but reporting as though it is absolute truth. It works because conspiracy theorists are by definition not mainstream and not expected to work within guidelines that a institution like the NIST must. The discrepancy creates an interesting dialog, where the officials generally don't bother to acknowledge the conspiracy theories, while conspiracies don't really attack the official story or actual evidence in a credible way. The only link between the two are media sources like the New York Daily News that are able to create a more interesting story by juxtaposing the two.

As of right now there are 43 comments on the Daily News story, which create kind of a hilarious dialog between people who believe the conspiracy and others who vehemently oppose it. It's hard for me to imagine the people behind these comments, but I suppose they could really be anyone. You would assume a lot of college students and maybe some precocious high schoolers, but for all I know my parents are secretly posting comments written in all caps on news stories in the spare time.

Conspiracy Theories in cartoons

I was excited to see my favorite online comic make fun of conspiracy theorists. Interesting that Chris Onstad chose the two most unsavory of Achewood characters for the gag.

Youtube

This video was sent a few days ago by a friend:



It's pretty funny, though gets kind of boring. The payoff is definitely not worth the buildup. But it is successful in its attention to detail, like the fake URL at the end, and the way it imitates the the grammatical constructions of "real" 9/11 conspiracy videos. I'm not sure if this is intended, but I think it is accurate in its mocking of making vague claims that aren't actually corroborated by the video--I'm never really sure what it is I'm supposed to be looking at in videos like this one:





(Interesting detail: the URL in this vid is also broken).

Like other, longer format documentaries, I am forced to question the motive behind these kinds of videos, the "real" ones at any rate. Real meaning they aren't jokes, like the first video. This video is so annoying to watch, with its glitch-y editing, it seems more like a stylized video art project than anything else.

The juxtaposition of these videos seems to capture the dichotomy of responses to the art of conspiracy theory. I find that most people are either quick to believe conspiracies, if not all, then some, while others are even quicker to make some sort of "mature" analysis like this one which was added by the editor to my brooklyn rail article: "Like all conspiracy theories, it taps into the powerlessness felt by the masses." I guess if I really had to think about it, I would probably be on the side of the editor, but I like to at least entertain the possibility of conspiracies before asserting my intellectual superiority over those who invent them. If nothing else, the creators of conspiracy theories, at least decent ones, are magnificent story tellers and fabricators, worthy of that much more praise for convincing at least the gullible among us that what they say is real. Much better than this guy anyway.

The Spirit of the Times

It’s telling that Dylan Avery started writing his popular 9/11 conspiracy film, Loose Change, as a novel, but instead turned it into a documentary. The film, besides having relatively clean graphics and video editing, stands out among other web-based conspiracy movies because of the strength of its narrative. It resembles mainstream political documentaries like Fahrenheit 9/11, and it strings together apparently legitimate sources into a compelling story that seamlessly explains the US government involvement in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Despite the vast amount of criticism debunking the theory, the DVD has sold fifty thousand copies, and the film has been viewed online over ten million times, even eliciting a response from the U.S. State Department. However, there has been little critical attention paid to the filmmaking itself.

Loose Change has spawned an abundance of YouTube videos that support, deny, or provide alternatives to its arguments about 9/11. The most recent film to gain similar web popularity, though almost no attention from the mainstream media, is Zeitgeist, a three-part attack on what it claims as the pillars of the American establishment: Christianity, the 9/11 conspiracy, and the Federal Reserve bank. Despite the lofty ambitions of the two-hour film, it appears to be successful, as its creators claim, somewhat dubiously, 2.1 million views per month on Zeitgeist’s website. I first heard of the film from a friend and Google employee, who last year lost one hundred dollars in a bet that the film would change his thinking.

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