Thursday, December 4, 2008

Jigsaw Post #2: I think it's teddible you are not taking me vetty seriously

Now that we got the less critical analysis out of the way, it's time to look at this a little seriously. You know, use the brain device thing to do brainwork. I said I'd actually THINK about this stuff, and I will keep my word. Word is bond. Straight up. You feel me? Also, big ups to Biggie. Love you, dawg.


Something Max said in the comments on Post #1 got me thinking. He asked,
have you considered whether this could be anti-nuke propaganda? if the dates are as right as you think they are, then that would put the film in a period where the russians didn't have nukes, so this might be their attack on them to discourage other nations from using them or condoning them.
He raises some good points. Combined with G.'s comment that, "Something about him doesn't sit right with me at the moment," I spent a while thinking about this guy before I made my other post.


Here's what I think the problem is: he looks too bourgeois.

Look at that picture. Three-piece suit. Desk blotter. Pen set. Nicely wood-paneled room. Maybe some sort of exotic bird in a cage next to him.

The entire thing sets off alarm bells with me that this guy is not an engineer, and he's not a proletarian. He seems un-Soviet.

If you think about most of the videos we wind up looking at, you usually see some dude in a jumpsuit or a white coat. Something that really brings out the SCIENCE+WORKERS! element of the Soviet Union. Either that or you get some jowly commissar with a bad haircut and bags under his eyes. By comparison, this guy looks like he lives in some nice digs. He almost seems like a banker. Maybe even a British banker. Like any second he's going to get a teacup and saucer and say "oooh, lovely!" and then say
Oh, by the way, I can't believe I forgot about this; I really would lose my head if it weren't attached to my neck! I'm so bloody forgetful. But, the thing is, and this is really quite a tedious point to make, chaps, but the thing is there's this new bomb that can obliterate life on earth. Cheerio! Toodle pip!
THAT'S what makes me think Max might be onto something here. What better way to send a message to democratic governments than with someone FROM there? He can talk to us because he looks like us. If you think about it in those terms, he looks more like a professor than a banker, so maybe he can tell us about the GRAVE THREAT of nuclear weapons.

You know who he really reminds me of? The English guy from the reanimation of animals video that EC linked way back in this post. You know, this dude:


I'm too lazy to go back and read when they did that video, but I remember he was a British scientist who got discredited because people thought that the USSR was using him as a mouthpiece to front for propaganda. The thing was, a lot of the stuff he was talking about WAS real, but it just seemed a little fishy that here was this guy who was just perfectly willing to shill for Soviet science. Maybe it's a loose connection, but if years before or years later or whenever it happened the Soviets were willing to go looking for a westerner to talk to a western audience, maybe that's an idea they would have had before or gone back to after. Does that make sense?


I'm not saying I have any real reason to go with this idea, but this is just what I came up with. Like GFK, something about this guy was just bothering me in my gut, and I couldn't tell what it was. This explanation quiets my gut down, and it would make sense given the dates this is probably from.


EDIT:
Somethings's gone really wrong with blogger all of a sudden. Arrrrggghghghghghghg fuck blogger!

My first post from today - which was AWESOME - for some reason is totally fucking up our blog's main page and making it not load. I figured out it was that post, but I don't want to delete it because maybe someone at blogger can fix it.

We can get around it for now though by making every post its OWN PAGE. I know it's sort of a headache to have to click if you want to go back and read GFK's post or something, but it's better than not being able to see it at all.

2 comments:

George F.K. said...

Hey, LS. I'm sorry nobody's written anything on your post. (It's very good, and I appreciate your remembering the Bogdanov animation experiments. That's a good reminder.) But as you discovered, Blogger went down for hours, and I know Max IMmed me saying that he wasn't even going to bother trying to come back here for a day until the damn page figured out how to load. Maybe EC's in the same boat. When you combine that with the end of the week, Friday night, and holidays coming, it's probably no wonder this place is a little dead. I know for a fact this comment would be a hell of a lot longer if I weren't deep in my cups already (thank you, free wine tasting and discounted cases!).

George F.K. said...

Crap, I just realized I forgot to say: sorry about your other blog post. It looks like Blogger just deleted it outright. I wish I'd gotten a chance to read it.