It’s too easy being cynical about the United States. You get accused of anti-Americanism or whatever, and it does sound childish often. But seriously now. It’s inescapable. How could anyone react to the healthcare reform dilemma in a way that doesn’t involve uncontrollable laughter and utter despair?

There are so many layers of fiction and incoherence to wade through in that debate that I can’t blame anyone for not being interested in it, let alone understanding it. The most immediate layer is the one where paranoid conservatives, hicks with delusions of grandeur, and wannabe re-enactors rage against the Obama Socialist Machine while a bunch of battered liberals defend a reform that will guarantee health care for most Americans and lower costs. This has very little to do with anything in the content of the proposed healthcare reform bills from Congress. Then there’s the media layer, where there’s all sorts of battles between the ‘industry’ and the ‘doctors’ and this and that faction of D.C. politicians, which, again, doesn’t really have anything to do with any reform proposals. Then there’s a political layer, where the conflict is between the Progressives, the Blue Dogs, the Republicans, and a bunch of other groups… and which has little to do with any real reform. There’s so much of this stuff that when you come up with what might seem the truth, it is so close to some stereotype of the political world that you wonder if this layer, too, is complete nonsense.

The whole thing is funny, because it puts a lot of liberals  in the uncomfortable position of having to defend reform they probably don’t agree with simply because the attacks from their rivals are so outlandish. But this is hardly a victory for Obama, since many of his supporters, though defending the idea of reform, are disappointed in him and his handling of the issue. But disappointed in what? In the idea that he is being too bipartisan, or too willing to give up things? How about people accept he never wanted those things in the first place. He’s only willing to give up things in the sense that he’s willing to completely ignore what people supposed he’d do, but which he obviously doesn’t have the disposition for. That’s the man’s reality. Or at least a layer closer to the center.

The whole town hall phenomenon is a bit overblown; surely a lot of these people simply like the attention, and the recent batch of protestors’ delusion that they have a  kinship with American revolutionaries shows that, deep down, they’re basically role playing. But there is something creepy about the content of these tales that people believe in, and why they’d believe them in the first place. What’s clear though is that Americans have these various myths about themselves and their country that are more and more detrimental to any sort of reasonable democratic dialogue. If you have to wade through ten thousand different false stories to get to any sort of understanding of what’s happening in your country’s government, you’re fucked.

Maybe that’s what They*wanted in the first place….

It was inevitable that the style some call hyperlink cinema (multiple, disjointed storylines that slowly connect to reveal essential truths about human interaction) would become the choice for commentary on globalization. The interconnected world hasn’t changed the alienation, cruelty, and loneliness of life. Films have explored these issues locally or globally; Traffic and Syriana more sociopolitical, Babel and 21 Grams more social and emotional. Lukas Moodysson’s Mammoth is more narrow in scope, less focused on narrative tricks. It focuses on the social relations of the globalized world with little fanfare, in a direct and clear way, without ever feeling dishonest. Events are presented in a way that some might consider hamfisted, but they are hardly ever contrivances or coincidences.

The film focuses on Leo and Allison (played by Gael Garcia Bernal and Michelle Williams), two upscale professionals living in New York. Leo is the creator of a Myspace clone and is in the process of selling it, which takes him on an extended trip to Thailand as he waits for the negotiations to be finalized. Meanwhile, Allison works long hours as a surgeon. Their daughter Jackie is taken care of by Gloria, the Filipino nanny. She is working in America in order to send money to her family and give them the type of life that most poor people in her country, can never truly aspire to. Her two children, Salvador and Manuel, deal with the realities of life in the Philippines without their mother. Leo escapes to the beaches and tries to get to know the places and people, but he can avoid neither his own dissatisfaction and alienation nor the fact that the problems of the world at large are much too complicated for his help.

The Third World is, in Moodysson’s story, little more than a large source of labor for the more advantaged First World and those at the top of the economic pyramid. The lines of work the characters from the Philippines and Thailand pursue are those focused not on development, but service. Gloria’s source of income comes from being the caretaker for a wealthy family and essentially the mother figure for the child. Cookie, the prostitute that Leo meets, makes a living by pleasuring inadequate foreign tourists looking for a cheap lay. Salvador, attempting to help his family, stumbles into the world of prostitution, perhaps the most blatant and disturbing example of poor nations being the playground of those with means. But a mere tale of evil exploiters would satisfy no one, and the effects of the one-way dynamics of these social relations end up affecting everyone, including our upscale leads, Leo and Allison. Leo’s trip to Thailand finds him confronting the realities of the world, and his inability to fully understand them through his framework of traditional liberalism. There are notable moments which show this inability. In one, Leo pays Cookie not to have sex with him or anyone that night, a noble but ultimately pointless gesture. In another moment, her self-image angers him, annoyed that it does not conform with his ‘equality’ standards, not understanding that her line of work requires her to present herself the way others want to see her. During one of his more trying times, he tells his wife he has to do something, help people out with his money, a moment portrayed not as the epiphany of a newborn philantropist but the reflex reaction of a lost and confused soul.

The greatest damage caused by these new social relations isn’t economic, it’s social. What all the characters have in common is that they are observing the way their actions are breaking down the family unit, but unable to stop themselves until the damage is done. The characters are all empty and lost, with various levels of awareness. They try to find happiness through substitution, replacing their loved ones with what they can find at hand; Gloria connects with Jackie in a way that indicates just how terribly she misses her own children, who are adrift in the Philippines, trying to understand the tangible material benefits that come from their mother’s work but unable to cope with the emotional pain of her absence.

Moodysson’s approach is direct, but never dishonest. There are no incredible coincidences, no plot contrivances so unbelievable that they reduce the message’s weight(think Crash). It’s not a very subtle film; the first half addresses technologies and new connections by having its characters constantly on their phones, computers, etc. Even Leo’s work (developing a Myspace for the gaming community) reminds us of these connections. What’s clear from the film is that these are all ultimately irrelevant, because it is the substance of the shared experiences that we have as pairs, families, or communities that ultimately matter.

In the end, the world keeps turning. For all the dramatic changes, there is no end to the game the players are in.

Three men and a woman answer an ad on a newspaper calling for willing participants for a research group. They’re informed that they’ll be filling out some forms, answering some test questions, and then based on their answers to the questions, one will be discarded every time, until there is one remaining subject, the ‘winner’ of the test. Their reward: a few hundred dollars. The three men and the woman (Haines, Paul, Tony, and Kerry, played by Timothy Hutton, Nick Cannon, Shea Wigham, and Clea Duvall) look haggard and poor—in need of these small rewards. In an adjacent room, Emily Riley (played by Chloe Sevigny) observes the proceedings. She has been brought in by Dr. Phillips (played by Peter Stormare), who is in charge of top secret research. She is unaware of what the research entails or its objective, and so are we. Is she being tested, rather than the subjects?

Soon after explaining the proceedings to the test subjects, Dr. Phillips executes Kerry in plain view of the rest, and leaves the room, which is now sealed. And with that, the experiment begins.

The purpose of this experiment is the subject of The Killing Room, another in a long entry of post-9/11 explorations of American paranoia. It’s taken quite a while for this paranoia to subside, and judging from the reaction to Barack Hussein Obama’s candidacy, it is still alive and healthy in the minds of many. The aftermath of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has left long-lasting images of torture and violence, still hard to assimilate by society at large. Emily Riley’s position is not much different from that of the many people who have worked prisons holding terrorism suspects, and can be related to the way many citizens understand their own government. A person who trusts her government and its causes is made to confront their extremes, and must try to make sense of it all. What could be the goal of this experiment, what could possibly justify coldly executing civilians and making them play bizarre little games before the kill?

Paul, Haines, and Tony are forced to play this game to survive, and that being the case, must play in different levels. They don’t want to play the game and try to deliberately break its rules in order to prevent any of their executions, but they also want to look out for themselves enough to sabotage the others’ plans. For a while, the film is interesting at showing these desperate, panicky men trying to figure out a way to outsmart the game while coming to terms with their own issues. They’re not painted in broad strokes; there’s no real heroics or massive personality clashes, just various degrees of common terror and panic. Throughout the game, the players are made to believe that their captors are Arabs; the experiment’s purpose is not revealed to them, and they have their own theories (that the process is being broadcast in order to break Americans’ morale). As Arab whispers are played in the background, the players become increasingly paranoid and terrified, while at the same time acquiring an additional purpose to live. Whereas at first the entire situation seems too arbitrary and cruel to make sense, the nationalism and terrorism dimension turns them from victims of psychopaths to players in a major conflict.

It’s impossible to explain how the film goes wrong without disclosing the purpose of the experiment, so bear with me. The experiment is meant to find people in society who are willing to die for their country. The ‘winner’ of the experiment ends up being the person who willingly sacrifices himself to allow the remaining subject to live. But the winner never manages to commit the suicide; the other subject is eliminated, and the suicidal one remains. The importance of the project is that this subject will be transformed into a suicide bomber. The program is America’s way of fighting fire with fire, by taking their own civilians and turning them into weapons. This would seem like an incredibly stupid and inhumane project. However, the history of United States Military projects has so many instances of criminally insane (or simply criminal) research and development that it actually becomes credible in its own stupid way.

What’s problematic about this ending is that it makes the entire series of events that occurs once the experiment starts rolling highly unlikely. Simply put, too many things absolutely must happen in order for the question to even be posed in the first place. The film sidesteps this issue with a cop-out: it suggests that the subject that the experiment’s managers had in mind had been chosen from the very beginning. While this can potentially deflect questions in the  “why did X happen” mold, it renders the entire struggle pointless, since their outcome was pre-determined. Even this excuse cannot change the fact that, for the sequence of events to result in the desired endpoint, the chosen subject had to act in a specific way in one instance, a way that would be entirely inconsistent with what the researchers were looking for. Justifying this by arguing that the outcome was predetermined hardly helps.

By the end, the entire rationale behind the plotline (why would suicide bombers be more effective than any of the other million options that America’s technology can bring) are so confusing and inplausible that instead of making us think about the ideas behind it, it keeps us focused on holes instead.