Anonymous-The Final Stop on the Search for Cool

When the subversion of the government is entangled with the question of coolness, cool becomes entangled in a debate of methods and results. In Fight Club, the actions of Project Mayhem are not very cool. Instead, the true coolness comes from the interactions between the narrator and Tyler Durden. A real-life organization that attempts to achieve goals through chaotic means is Earth First!. Earth First! is an environmentally friendly group that wishes to preserve the environment at any cost. Although one of their principal beliefs is non-violence, they have absolutely no problem disrupting the progress of businesses and governments in order to stop the destruction of the environment. Additionally, there is an offshoot group of Earth First! known as the Earth Liberation Front. The people in the ELF take their quest even further, using ecotage to destroy anything they see as a possible hinderence to their cause(please watch this). Unfortunately for Earth First!, most people do not buy into their message of environmental protection because of the strange nature of its members. Because they are so extreme, their members are not made up of normal people. Instead, the group tends to be populated with all kinds of strange folk.

A group that is on the opposite end of the spectrum of groups that attempt social change is Anonymous. This group, originating from web sites such as 4chan, is made up of a group of nameless and faceless computer users who attempt social change at their own unpredictable whim. Although there have been protests in the real world, the primary methods that Anonymous uses are virtual attacks. A very popular form of this kind of attack is a DDoS attack, which prevents people from visiting the attacked Internet site. One particular group that Anonymous attempts to disrupt on a regular basis is the Church of Scientology. Their biggest assault on Scientology came with Project Chanology, the primary goal of which was to protest Scientology with live protests, DDoS attacks, and by spreading information to people. However, not all of Anonymous's attacks come about for legitimate reasons. They have also been credited with causing a great deal of chaos on the Internet for no particular reason. When digging into the sites that house Anonymous, only one semi-true answer can be found: They did it because they thought it would be funny.

Overall, coolness has been found just about everywhere. However, coolness itself seems to be very subjective, and the question of whether or not anything is cool is a matter of perspective. For example, members of Earth First! are probably much more likely to think that the Earth Liberation Front is cool than most normal members of society. Cool is definitely an abstract concept that everyone has a unique opinion on, but by tracking the views of what groups of people think is cool over time, we can come to realize that our own perceptions of coolness were influenced by the past. Ultimately, our average ideas on what is cool and what is uncool will change over time, and our little search for cool will have its little place as cool continues to change throughout the distant future.

The Meaning Behind Violence

Fight Club provides a very interesting movie experience. Throughout the entire film, men are beaten, bruised and bloodied as they fight each other to the point of needing hospitalization. However, there is more to the fighting in Fight Club than sheer violence. Unlike Reservoir Dogs, where violence was excessive and unnecessary, the violence in Fight Club is a direct result of the repressed emotions of the fighters. For example, the main character has been forced into a cookie cutter life where he is only a cog in the corporate machine. The most expression that he has is his furniture, but even then, his furniture is also a product of the corporate world that he cannot escape. Because he feels he cannot escape from his problems, the main character and the imaginary personality Tyler Durden create a fight club. The fight club is a place where oppressed men can release their true emotions through fighting. In coming closer to death, men can feel more human than they ever could by remaining white collar workers. At first, the heavy fighting of the men is nothing more than an emotional outlet, but as time goes on, it starts to devolve into a kind of sinister insanity aimed at destroying the corporate world. However, whether its part of emotional expression or insane subversion, the violence in Fight Club is necessary to truly see the motivations behind the characters. Through their illegal acts, viewers of the movie can feel what the fighters feel and think. This kind of connection makes the ending of Fight Club extremely intense, as the main character's actions are both seen and felt.

Another aspect of Fight Club that is important is the way that it targets the corporate world. In the view of the main character, corporations are the most horrible thing that has happened to the world. He believes that the best way for humanity to proceed is to abandon our reliance on modern life and simply return to a state of primal harmony. Although the methods of the main character are quite clear, I must question the reasons for why he wishes to destroy the modern world. It is true that living as a white collar employee has done a large amount of damage to the main character's emotional state. Because he is treated like a small part of the corporate machine, he has no individuality, making him feel entirely alone and unnecessary. These feelings of worthlessness is what prompted his mind to create Tyler Durden. Although the creation of a fight club as an emotional release is a rational decision, the main character's descent into corporate subversion is not. Corporations do indeed make people into cold machine slaves that toil to maintain the modern world. However, by destroying the order of the modern world, the main character simply makes white collar workers slaves to his decisions. Another more rational decision for the main character to make (although it would have made a very boring movie) would have been to escape the city world and move into a more rural part of the country. By leaving, he would have been able to live a life of perfect nonconformity. Luckily, the film follows a path that allows us to see both Tyler Durden and the insanity of the main character, making Fight Club a truly excellent movie.

So What if he Can't Draw, it's Still Cool!

Reservoir Dogs brings with it the concept of cool literacy. While being able to read is an almost certain thing within our society, I feel literacy has moved beyond its basic definition to simply mean that being literate is having an understanding beyond the aesthetic in multiple areas while being able to see the connections behind those areas. For example, a mechanic may know the intricacies behind how a car engine works, but without knowledge of other diverse subjects like science, literature, and politics, he would have a low literacy level. In Reservoir Dogs, the main characters all know the way that crime works. In addition, in scenes that are spliced throughout the film, we see the characters talking about various other subjects like pop culture that add depth to their personalities. For viewers of the film, a certain level of literacy is required to understand the film beyond the seemingly random conversations and violence. Having the ability to see the cultural understandings that the characters make through their conversations makes the film much more powerful, especially in terms of the betrayal and Mr. Orange. The betrayal goes from an undercover cop performing his duty to a scene of a friend completely destroying his relationships and condemning his friends to death.

Literacy is cool for a very simple reason. Without literacy, only aesthetic observations can be made about things, meaning that content that would otherwise be known is lost through the fog of illiteracy. XKCD requires at least some literacy in order for it to be funny. The comic strip, in the words of the creator, is "A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language." Because XKCD assumes the literacy of the reader, it can make jokes about anything including current politcial news, pop culture trends, and even math. Because the comic strip transcends all areas of knowledge, it becomes funnier with the more things that the reader knows. For example, before becoming versed in technological jargon, this strip would be meaningless. However, when it is known that sudo is a command in Linux operating systems that forces the computer to do something regardless of the circumstances, then the strip becomes a quick laugh about Linux. Overall, I highly recommend XKCD to anyone who can read English and has at least a little bit of literacy. It is a very fun experiance.

Unfortunately, a lack of literacy amongst most people has caused our entertainment to decline in recent years. Although we have not slipped back into the practice of bear baiting, our entertainment is growing considerably more vulgar as a result of a lack of literacy. One example of this is the cartoon Family Guy. While Family Guy does have some funny moments, it is plagued by a type of humor that is characteristic of the rising vulgar movement. However, even though vulgarity is on the rise, there has also been an increase in literate entertainment. The Discovery Channel boasts many programs designed to entertain and educate the audience. Shows like MythBusters, How It's Made, and multiple specials on everything from science, art, and history are far from vulgar, but they can retain their quality as good television shows. My hypothesis to why there is both a rise in vulgar and literate entertainment is the diversity of entertainment sources. Because of cable television and the Internet, anything that a person wants to watch is available. Therefor, because the source is unlimited, it is ultimately up to people to make the decision to whether or not they wish to have literacy co-mingling with their entertainment.

Cool and Uncool, Brought to you by 8-tracks!

Here are a few pairings of things that are cool and things that are not.
Cool/Uncool
Stephen Colbert/Larry King
Facebook/E-Mail
Moderates/Extremists
Marijuana/Tobacco
Soldiers/The Army
Metal/Emo
Wikipedia/Encyclopedia
President Obama/Speaker Pelosi
Christian/"Hardcore" Christian
Evolution/Intelligent Design
Internet/Computing
Socialized Medicine/Socialism
IHop/Waffle House
Hacking/Network Security
Pirating/Buying
Star Wars/Star Trek
Spending/Saving
Gay Marriage/Gay Sex
Fluent Spanish/Mandatory Spanish
Promiscuity/Male Virginity
Contraceptives/Unplanned Pregnancy
Windows XP/Windows Vista
Linux/Windows and Mac
Cassettes/.mp3
World of Warcraft/Dungeons and Dragons
Indifference/Obsession
Retirement/Work
Pride/Humility
Relaxation/Ambition
Power/Submission

This list of cool and uncool things shows something about the state of coolness in America. Much has remained unchanged for coolness in the past few decades in the realm of cool. Extreme socialists and hyper-conservatives are still uncool in politics, however, despite a distaste for socialism, people want the government to provide health care as a universal service. In addition, having sex with multiple partners is considered cool while boys who are virgins past the age of 16 are uncool. Power has maintained itself as a necessity for cool, but this power is especially cool when it allows a person to delegate tasks while relaxing on a boat. However, there have been some changes in coolness that are mostly due to the education process. For example, while having a lot of sex is cool, unprotected sex has become uncool. This is a result of increased education over sexually transmitted diseases and sexual education in general (except for abstinence programs). After seeing videos of men and women with herpes, unprotected sex suddenly becomes much less cool. Another aspect of coolness that has changed because of education is the acceptance of evolution as a valid idea. As more school children learn of evolution, they begin to shun the idea of intelligent design as wrong. Regardless of the actual truth behind the past (which is hard to uncover without one of these), evolution will continue to be cool as long as it is taught as correct.

One part of cool that will always change but be cool in the same way is new technology. Ever since the widespread use of new technologies past World War II, every piece of new meaningful technology has been adopted as the coolest thing to have for that time. The easiest way to see this is the evolution of musical storage and playing devices. Records and record players were around for long enough to simply be considered a static presence in the method of listening to music. However, with the introduction of the cassette tape, people began to get rid of records and replace them with the newer, smaller format. With a cassette deck in a car or a boom box on a shoulder, people could listen to music while traveling around. This trend continued further with the introduction of the Compact Disk (CD), and in recent years, CDs are being replaced with portable media devices capable of storing entire discographies and hours of videos while being smaller than a CD case. Ultimately, new technologies are cool because they offer a greater capacity for more fun and less work. E-Mail was very cool in the 90's because it offered a quicker way to send information than with a phone call or letter, but Facebook is now cooler than E-Mail because Facebook allows people to communicate socially with even less effort than E-Mail. As we roll into the 2010's, our current technologies will be swept into the realm of uncoolness as newer technologies give replace them as material representations of coolness.

Its Really About Determination

Although the documentary Paris Is Burning is about the struggles of transvestites in the late '80s, I believe that the coolness that is generated by the characters in the movie is truly a result of both their struggles to remove themselves from poverty and to be accepted by mainstream society. Like I said in my last blog post, people like Willi Ninja are cool because they use their own skill and determination to make their lives better. Because coolness can be directly generated by working hard to achieve a good goal, these people are cool. One movie where this kind of effort is seen is Pursuit of Happyness. In this film, Chris Gardner is a poor man who spends his family's life savings on bone-density scanners in an attempt to sell them and turn a profit, but because the scanners are not in high demand, his family is brought into poverty from the resulting debt. The financial stress that this brings leads Chris's wife to leave him, leaving him to raise his son by himself. Soon, without a source of income, Chris and his son find themselves to be homeless, but they are not without hope. By a stroke of luck, Chris makes it into an internship at a stockbroker firm. Throughout six months, he balances homelessness, daycare for his son, and his unpaid internship in order to get a better life for him and his son. At the end of the film, Chris finally finishes his internship, and as a result, he is finally able to provide from him and his son. This kind of determination and effort makes Chris Gardner a very cool person. Although Chris is also black, his ethnicity has nothing to do with his coolness. Instead, his coolness comes from him working hard and achieving against all odds to make him and his son rise out of poverty. It is this kind of tenacity at working at a just goal that can make someone cool.
Another aspect of the transvestites' coolness (although not as cool as those who were attempting to work out of poverty) is the fight to become more accepted in society. Throughout history, both black and homosexual people have been outside of the mainstream white culture. However, the fight to become accepted as equals is also a fight that gives these two groups coolness. One film where acceptance is prominently featured is Blazing Saddles. In this movie, Bart, a black man who becomes sheriff of an Old West town, struggles to become accepted by the town, as most of the townspeople would rather just hang Bart than have to deal with having a black sheriff. However, over time, he is able to win the townspeople's trust as sheriff. In a way, the coolness that comes from overcoming racial injustices is the same kind of coolness that is generated from overcoming poverty. In both cases, people use hard work to overcome horrible problems to reach a much better state in life. Ultimately, the kind of coolness that is shown in these three movies can be broken down into a simple formula: Coolness can be made by determinately working hard at improving the life of the self or of others.

Groups of People are not Cool

Although there are a few cool people within Paris is Burning, no one is cool because they belong to a society of people. Homosexuals and African Americans are not cool because of their sexual identity or their ethnic heritage. Although both of these groups have been historically oppressed by the white mainstream, they do not become cool simply because they are oppressed. I do not mean to say that the oppression of any people by another is right, but an oppressed group is not cool simply because they are oppressed. Take the example of Pepper LaBeija. Although LaBeija is both gay and black, he is not cool for either of these qualities. The coolness that comes from LaBeija is generated by his power and strong motherly qualities. By controlling the House of LaBeija, he is in command of a large group of baller queens. Additionally, he uses this power to spread his help amongst his daughters in the House. Whenever one of his daughters needs advice on anything from clothes to dancing to life related issues, LaBeija is there to provide help. Another person from the film that is cool because of factors other than race and gender was Willi Ninja. Ninja's coolness had nothing to do with him being either black or gay. Instead, Ninja's coolness came from his path in life. He started out as a very poor man. However, through hard work and determination, he took his personalized version of vogue dancing to the mainstream. Before he died in 2006, he had even made television appearances and owned a modeling agency. The way that he rose from poverty and became a wealthy and well-respected man is what made him cool-not being gay and black.

Documentaries themselves are not very cool. Although the people within documentaries may be a little cool for their own personal achievements, documentaries and the people who make them are generally considered to be very uncool and boring. The reason for this is the lack of entertainment in documentaries. Movies that are cool like Star Wars, Terminator, and Casablanca would not be cool if we came out of the movie theater thinking, "Wow, that movie was boring." However, documentaries are not without merit entirely. Through using investigative techniques, important issues can be explored and introduced to the public through the easy to digest medium of film. Unfortunately, the boring nature of these films often means that people are not willing to see them because the primary reason to go to a movie theater is to be entertained. As a result, people who make documentaries are often either completely ignored or looked upon as uncool. For example, Michael Moore is not a cool person. Even though he is well known for his work in making documentaries, he is not cool because he does not have the kinds of determination that we consider to be cool as a society. Willi Ninja is cool for rising out of poverty and becoming a successful person through his own sheer will and determination. Michael Moore is simply a documentary maker who is arrogant enough to feature himself in his own films, and there is no way a combination of arrogance and documentaries is cool at all.

Action Coolness

Although the topic for this week is cool satire, part of the coolness that is generated by RoboCop is the action that permeates the film. Although the satire definitely delivers a compelling message, action is an exclusive part of RoboCop that is cool regardless of a person's ability to understand the satire that is in the movie. Scenes of explosions, gunfire and car chases are cool because they allow the viewer to experience a world of excitement and danger from the safety of a movie theater seat. RoboCop is designed as a great action film. By discarding the normal conventions of science and technology, machines like RoboCop and Ed can battle each other with maximum explosive power. If this scene was to be reproduced in real life with a viewer of RoboCop as a participant, the viewer would most likely be scared and run away in horror. However, because of the safe barrier of fiction, any viewer who suspends a little bit of disbelief can revel in the exiting scene.

One film that masters the art of the action film is Terminator 2: Judgment Day. In this film, the shape shifting robot T-1000 is attempting to kill John Connor. In order to save his life, another terminator and John's mother flee from the T-1000, but upon realizing that it needs to be stopped, they arm themselves to the teeth and destroy it in a blaze of fire. The coolness from this movie is generated through the sheer amount of action that is present throughout the film. For example, in one scene, John Connor and his terminator guardian free his mother and narrowly escape from the steely death of the T-1000. Although the evil machine is very powerful, the three heroes are able to escape when the T-800, John's protector, uses his body as a shield against bullets. In a very similar way to how RoboCop and all action movies entertain us, the coolness of action films is generated by incredibly exciting scenes that would be horribly frightening in real life. I can guarantee that if most people saw a real T-1000 advancing with quasi mercuric limbs shaped as knives, then they would cower in absolute fear instead of handling the situation in an exciting manner. Another aspect of Terminator 2 that is also mirrored in RoboCop is the use of special effects. Although special effects are nowhere near our current level of computer-generated special effects, the use of explosions and robots in both films adds to the coolness of the action. Without special effects, the action becomes closer to real life, and as a result, the movie becomes less exciting and cool.

Ultimately, action films serve as more of an escape than anything else. By presenting us with incredible scenes of action that would normally strike fear into our hearts, we are able to enjoy the excitement and thrills that can never enter our own lives without also introducing tragedy. Without action, our lives would be horribly boring. Because we are able to sit back and experience the kinds of excitement that we can never have in our real lives, action movies are definitely cool.