"With great privilege comes great responsibility." So says the corrupt old turtle who runs the city Dirt in the new animated film Rango. Not long ago, Americans flocked to theaters to hear the truism that with great power comes great responsibility, in one of the biggest hits of the immediate post-9/11 era saw Peter Parker that he had no choice but to crusade against evil. The Americans wanted to believe to be a great power (or powers of Spiderman's case) meant simply had to go out and beat up the bad guys. The Good Guy-Bad guy Matrix is more confused today than it was in 2002, and corrupt mayor Dirt knows it - he engineers an economic crisis to lure the city's residents out of their country. Large companies use their flexible friends in government to fool the public and reap a windfall. Where have we heard this before?
Equal parts of Chinatown, Blazing Saddles, Rango offers an inspired revision of some classic themes in American political culture. Its surreal visual style suggestions for Tim Burton or Quentin Tarantino might recast the western genre, while its overall political narrative successfully connect the pulse of populist outrage behind many stories about the U.S. border to politics today's major recession. The border was often the history of booms and busts, and the city Dirt speaks to a rich tradition of big dreams crashing into the bitter reality, given the country's recent brush with financial disaster adventure a chameleon who tries to outwit the corrupt politicians and speculators seem too familiar.
This interpretation is not a stretch - the message of the film is so simple, only the most narrow Tea Parties may miss it. When Rango comes to town, the inhabitants of dirt clinging to a meager existence in the scorching desert, where water is the currency of everyday life. They pay their bills with water, and the operating bank in the water. The key ingredient that makes the farm for Community grizzled moles, mice and geckos to survive. "Control of water and you can control everything," the wily mayor intones at one point, when he reroutes the local water supply for Las Vegas and uses the ensuing crisis to force peasants to give up their land. The political allegory works on two levels, one environmental and one economic. Politicians win so valuable resources are diverted to both large-scale human development and a small, rodent size suburb built on land the mayor hopes to steal, the memories of Chinatown in Los Angeles's vampiric rise in the middle of southern California desert is sufficiently clear.
However, the mayor system also serves as an analogy of the bailout era. Money is not only a natural resource for the people of Dirt - the display is clearly a metaphor for the money or capital. A bank run breaks out when a panic villager announces, "There is no water in the bank!" The locals are like many Americans, who wondered how the country had so much money one day and then next they hear that jobs are disappearing, the budget cut, and banks no longer have money to lend. We used to have water - where did everything go? It just disappeared? The mayor and his cronies are caricatures of the financial and political elite. Turtle speaks of an old patrician voice, giggling with her Eurotrash cronies and golfing. As farmers, workers, and small businesses go belly up, they laugh about getting all the water for themselves. While Rango's love interest (the requisite feisty heroine / sidekick) dreams of a better world, an impossible place, where "there is enough water for all." She could think of a socialist promised land where everyone shares resources, but the vision is more likely that the classic American farmers / homeowners - landed independence and broadly shared prosperity. This is among the most resonant themes in American politics, popular culture, including economic policy. It reflects a concept of citizenship in which all should have a piece of cake, even share the same size, its critical weakness is the eternal conflict between the physical property - land, houses, farms - and Paper Power of shares, contracts and intellectual property. The message of Rango is that it is "enough water for all", but malignant corporate interests and their willing collaborators in the government game to enrich themselves.
Rango course, is Obama. He is a stranger to the city - "not from here," as one local points out. He uses his rhetorical gifts to spin stories that get city residents' confidence, but their patience wears thin in the face of straitened circumstances and impending catastrophe. Rango warns people that they blindly would face each other if the water runs out, and a contagion of mob violence is a constant threat. An angry taxpayer Rango for his inability to finish the difficult times, said: "You said you'd bring back the water!" Rango implores people to hold on to hope, to believe in him and the rule of law, but all evidence indicates that the system is hopelessly corrupt.
The film is not just an allegory of the current economic crisis, but a story that taps into the deeper contradictions of the U.S. company. In one of his more impromptu round of speechifying Rango talking about the "spirit of the West, the eternally unattainable ideal." The West has, of course, represented the possibility of economic freedom, usually tied to country, from Jefferson's ideal of independence, peasant farmer to the west rush of settlers of the Homestead Act, the suburbanization of cities like Phoenix and Los Angeles, where each family could (the thought ) tend to their own little patch of paradise.
That these dreams extremely disappointed many is the stuff of much American history. Lenders, borrowers, and speculators in a border Boomtown after another found themselves overextended, and millions of peasants filled the plains and glutted world markets in commodities. The Populists of the 1890s asked why they sank deeper and deeper in debt even as the railroad interests and Chicago financiers grew rich by selling their crops. Like the citizens of Dirt and its outlying farms, they wanted to know why the system seemed to favor only those who actually do not work in the country. The latest populist anger against the bailout of Wall Street repeats the theme of wealth over work, financiers picked the pockets of government and ordinary Americans are forced to leave their homes, just like clique which tried to use guilt and political connections to force lizards and rodents out of their country in Rango.
Like any Hollywood movie (especially a cartoon), Rango serves up easy answers. The hero must confront self-doubt before you learn to believe in himself and triumphed over the evil forces. Significantly hardscrabble people who previously did the mayor's bidding acknowledge their ties to other oppressed citizens and rally against a common enemy. But the final scenes of the film is more appealing, as artificially restrained water source eventually loose. Something that previously scarce - water (capital) - mines all over the little beast city, and almost destroys half. The locals are happy that the water is back again, hardly notice that it has ripped through and demolished many of their stores and salons. What better metaphor for the capital in an age of tight credit and Wall Street profiteering? Rango is Capital's creative destruction as most corrupt, creative and destructive.
Sayf Alex Cummings is an assistant professor of history at Georgia State University. His work deals with the media, law, and political culture in the modern United States. He has received a Whiting Fellowship, an ACLS-Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship and American Baptist Historical Society Torbet Prize. His work has appeared in Salon, Brooklyn Rail, Journal of American History, Technology and Culture and the edited volume of sound in reproductive age from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Equal parts of Chinatown, Blazing Saddles, Rango offers an inspired revision of some classic themes in American political culture. Its surreal visual style suggestions for Tim Burton or Quentin Tarantino might recast the western genre, while its overall political narrative successfully connect the pulse of populist outrage behind many stories about the U.S. border to politics today's major recession. The border was often the history of booms and busts, and the city Dirt speaks to a rich tradition of big dreams crashing into the bitter reality, given the country's recent brush with financial disaster adventure a chameleon who tries to outwit the corrupt politicians and speculators seem too familiar.
This interpretation is not a stretch - the message of the film is so simple, only the most narrow Tea Parties may miss it. When Rango comes to town, the inhabitants of dirt clinging to a meager existence in the scorching desert, where water is the currency of everyday life. They pay their bills with water, and the operating bank in the water. The key ingredient that makes the farm for Community grizzled moles, mice and geckos to survive. "Control of water and you can control everything," the wily mayor intones at one point, when he reroutes the local water supply for Las Vegas and uses the ensuing crisis to force peasants to give up their land. The political allegory works on two levels, one environmental and one economic. Politicians win so valuable resources are diverted to both large-scale human development and a small, rodent size suburb built on land the mayor hopes to steal, the memories of Chinatown in Los Angeles's vampiric rise in the middle of southern California desert is sufficiently clear.
However, the mayor system also serves as an analogy of the bailout era. Money is not only a natural resource for the people of Dirt - the display is clearly a metaphor for the money or capital. A bank run breaks out when a panic villager announces, "There is no water in the bank!" The locals are like many Americans, who wondered how the country had so much money one day and then next they hear that jobs are disappearing, the budget cut, and banks no longer have money to lend. We used to have water - where did everything go? It just disappeared? The mayor and his cronies are caricatures of the financial and political elite. Turtle speaks of an old patrician voice, giggling with her Eurotrash cronies and golfing. As farmers, workers, and small businesses go belly up, they laugh about getting all the water for themselves. While Rango's love interest (the requisite feisty heroine / sidekick) dreams of a better world, an impossible place, where "there is enough water for all." She could think of a socialist promised land where everyone shares resources, but the vision is more likely that the classic American farmers / homeowners - landed independence and broadly shared prosperity. This is among the most resonant themes in American politics, popular culture, including economic policy. It reflects a concept of citizenship in which all should have a piece of cake, even share the same size, its critical weakness is the eternal conflict between the physical property - land, houses, farms - and Paper Power of shares, contracts and intellectual property. The message of Rango is that it is "enough water for all", but malignant corporate interests and their willing collaborators in the government game to enrich themselves.
Rango course, is Obama. He is a stranger to the city - "not from here," as one local points out. He uses his rhetorical gifts to spin stories that get city residents' confidence, but their patience wears thin in the face of straitened circumstances and impending catastrophe. Rango warns people that they blindly would face each other if the water runs out, and a contagion of mob violence is a constant threat. An angry taxpayer Rango for his inability to finish the difficult times, said: "You said you'd bring back the water!" Rango implores people to hold on to hope, to believe in him and the rule of law, but all evidence indicates that the system is hopelessly corrupt.
The film is not just an allegory of the current economic crisis, but a story that taps into the deeper contradictions of the U.S. company. In one of his more impromptu round of speechifying Rango talking about the "spirit of the West, the eternally unattainable ideal." The West has, of course, represented the possibility of economic freedom, usually tied to country, from Jefferson's ideal of independence, peasant farmer to the west rush of settlers of the Homestead Act, the suburbanization of cities like Phoenix and Los Angeles, where each family could (the thought ) tend to their own little patch of paradise.
That these dreams extremely disappointed many is the stuff of much American history. Lenders, borrowers, and speculators in a border Boomtown after another found themselves overextended, and millions of peasants filled the plains and glutted world markets in commodities. The Populists of the 1890s asked why they sank deeper and deeper in debt even as the railroad interests and Chicago financiers grew rich by selling their crops. Like the citizens of Dirt and its outlying farms, they wanted to know why the system seemed to favor only those who actually do not work in the country. The latest populist anger against the bailout of Wall Street repeats the theme of wealth over work, financiers picked the pockets of government and ordinary Americans are forced to leave their homes, just like clique which tried to use guilt and political connections to force lizards and rodents out of their country in Rango.
Like any Hollywood movie (especially a cartoon), Rango serves up easy answers. The hero must confront self-doubt before you learn to believe in himself and triumphed over the evil forces. Significantly hardscrabble people who previously did the mayor's bidding acknowledge their ties to other oppressed citizens and rally against a common enemy. But the final scenes of the film is more appealing, as artificially restrained water source eventually loose. Something that previously scarce - water (capital) - mines all over the little beast city, and almost destroys half. The locals are happy that the water is back again, hardly notice that it has ripped through and demolished many of their stores and salons. What better metaphor for the capital in an age of tight credit and Wall Street profiteering? Rango is Capital's creative destruction as most corrupt, creative and destructive.
Sayf Alex Cummings is an assistant professor of history at Georgia State University. His work deals with the media, law, and political culture in the modern United States. He has received a Whiting Fellowship, an ACLS-Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship and American Baptist Historical Society Torbet Prize. His work has appeared in Salon, Brooklyn Rail, Journal of American History, Technology and Culture and the edited volume of sound in reproductive age from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
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