Brave New Spectacle

Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to meet three crew members from Brave New Films. They're a popular video collective who led a workshop on creating viral videos. The video above was posted yesterday onto their YouTube channel. If you have ever seen any of Robert Greenwald's films (Iraq for Sale, Outfoxed, Unprecedented, etc.) you have seen Brave New Films. Perhaps their most well-known viral YouTube video is "Fox News Porn", attacking the myth that Fox is a conservative news organization (that's a myth?) and eschews sexual deviance. In fact, BNF shows, Fox embraces sexual deviance. But perhaps my favorite BNF mashup is "Fox Attacks Bloggers". How pertinent?

The key to BNF's viral-ness is its ability to "pick fights" as they said in their workshop. Succinctness also plays an obvious role with regards to the internet. They likened the good vs. evil plot purity of their films to DC comic books and Star Wars films. I think this is a more intelligent move than most would assume. In the first chapter of Society of the Spectacle, Debord wrote that,

"In analyzing the spectacle we are obliged to a certain extent to use the spectacle’s own language, in the sense that we have to operate on the methodological terrain of the society that expresses itself in the spectacle. For the spectacle is both the meaning and the agenda of our particular socio-economic formation. It is the historical moment in which we are caught."