Watch All The Movies, Part 6:This Is Channel Zero

I picked this up years ago at, I think, HMV in Vancouver back when there were still record stores (ask your parents); apparently the release date was 1997. It was a "video magazine", and I've got it on the original VHS, baby. It starts with a (sigh) couple of bicycle couriers robbing a office that apparently is run by A LARGE AND EVIL MULTI-NATIONAL CORPORATION:

The half-time show, "99 Year Phone Call", is a, um, performance piece? --wait, sorry, "post-modern culture jam" about the Y2K bug as a metaphor for, uh, fear and video editing and stuff; it's like watching a community theatre production of a William Gibson novel.

But these are the easy targets. There are a lot of interviews with people discussing corporate ownership of media, economic fairness and the FCC (among lots of other things). It wanders, but I suppose reflects the magazine format. Overall, a lot of this reminds me of the essays I wrote for English class in high school: they wander, they dance around, and they bring up lots of questions, but come to few conclusions. They don't like TV, but maybe it can be used as a way to, you know, liberate the people. (That is, as long as they believe the right things....one of the talking heads points out that giving people video cameras to make their own media is all well and good, but they're likely to only remake what they've already seen.) There are lots of Chomsky and MacLuhan quotes, painful-to-watch skits (op cit.), and gratuitous scrolling text, jump cuts and repetition of the words "control", "corporations" and "governments."

I would have been all over this once upon a time. (Obviously not enough to actually watch this, since I never made it past the first twenty minutes until now...) I'm still broadly sympathetic to the concerns outlined here. But I have such little patience anymore for the cliches they wallow in, and the lack of citations for anything they assert. (Yes, I know it's video. I don't care: sources or GTFO.)

Amusingly, the name Channel Zero is now being used by a Canadian media company that owns Bloomberg TV Canada and several adult film channels. Also, at least a few of the people involved in this are listed in LinkedIn.

Like so much of what I suspect I'll end up watching this year, it's available on archive.org