In 1932 Aldous Huxley wrote the novel Brave New World. It illuminated a futuristic surveillance world of 2540. In 1997 Suze Orman, TV huckster, began her notorious financial-planning media-career.
Upon hearing Huxley’s audio lecture, I was struck by his reflection upon the breadth and depth of ‘big’ media’s saturation and our willingness to comply to its manipulative messages. Huxley’s critical point is a nod to Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony. While Huxley expresses his grave concern for the unending inculcation of media oligarchies, he is quick to dialectically connect this process with an opposite and equal collusion by those being oppressed. Hegemony is a two-way street. Citizens-viewers are usually complicit in their own servitude.
I chose Orman as an accomplice in this video because of her incessant, authoritarian, Big Brother, finger-pointing performative style. Orman is but another TV face-mouth-mediamonger extolling virtues of capitalism run amuk. Thus, I chose a zoom-and hold shot, tightly reframed and reduced in size. It is an attempt to confine Orman’s mouth, while shifting focus to Huxley’s voice. Moreover, the frame size infers multiple readings. Is Orman’s face an enormous Big Brother screen – or a peephole?
Orwell-Orman 2008 (2:30)
