Bloggrokker (Scott) 9/19

Surrender, Dorothy!
Yep, those words written in the black smoke spewing from the tail of a witch-in-flight's broomstick, this witch banking and cackling high above a lulling field of poppies.
A cinema special effect from the year 1939--ironically, the same year the Nazi tanks rolled into Poland.
Surrender, Warsaw!
Some explanations are required. During the last class's Benjamin talk, a classmate had alluded to the enjoyment of films dampened from the supersaturated media-landscaping of celebrity info, resulting in the seeing of actors and actresses as mere costume-ballers than as characters. Hearing this, my mind tangentially tripped upon the ways in which current--i. e. postmodern--DVD marketing schemes not only cram celebrity bios down the mass-culture piehole, but demystify the filmmaking process itself.
From Finding Nemo to Forrest Gump, Lord of the Rings to Harry Potter and the Whatsit of Whatever, Armageddon to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, anything remotely approaching the realm of special effects--or fx, the hip signifier for the hip orthography set--be it cgi, scale-modeling, lighting, specialized lenses, or even a Bob Mackie wardrobe-job, receives a deconstructed packaging digitally encoded into a second or third disc.
And this consumer-driven po-mo syndrome is retrogressive.
Older films, films from what we might cynically call the Pleistocene epoch of filmmaking technology, are reissued, re-marketed, re-engineered, with the digital bric-a-brac of film historians giving the lowdown on antiquated film techniques.
And it wouldn't surprise me if the current disc for The Wizard of Oz comes equipped with such demystifying bells and whistles--the kinds of po-mo weaponry stripping Margaret Hamilton's witch-in-flight of any cinematic wizardry.
Then it hit me. My mind dropped an--forgiveness please for the impending pun--L. Frank Bomb.
"PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN!"--this familar cry, forever parodied , or perhaps rendered in pastiche, in pop culture rings as a pre-postmodern warning against postmodernity's demystification of the film image, or any image, for that matter. This cry demands that the camera's trickery requires no explanation, no breaking down, no inkling of behind-the-laboratory door machinations.
It appears Oz the Great and Terrible suffers from some kind of cultural clairvoyancy.
And historical mimicry, too. Here's where the Nazi/Oz parallel enters into it.
Oz the Great and Terrible smacks of Adorno and Horkheimer's assessment of "the Fuhrer's metaphysical charisma, invented by the sociology of religion . . . which demonically parodies that of the divine spirit." Metahysical charisma? Oz and Adolf got it down. And I believe the Kingdom of Oz existed under a rather mocking sociology of religion. So too, the Third Reich. As for demonic parodies of divine spirits, filling in the blanks shouldn't be too hard.
And the big similarity? Oz is revealed as a sham cloaked in technology.
Hitler? Kinda the same thing.
Adorno and Horkheimer were right--the culture industry does infect everything with sameness.