{"id":1832,"date":"2020-04-14T23:02:19","date_gmt":"2020-04-14T23:02:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/?p=1832"},"modified":"2020-04-15T01:59:23","modified_gmt":"2020-04-15T01:59:23","slug":"intoxication","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/2020\/04\/14\/intoxication\/","title":{"rendered":"Intoxication"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

[Started 08\/04\/20] During an interview with BBC Radio Classics, composer Daniel Pemberton discussed how one track for his score to the motion picture Gold <\/em>essentially operates as \u201cthe quintessential sound of capitalism\u201d[1]<\/a>. The track, \u2018At the Sound of the Bell\u2019, is first heard at \u2013 and incorporates the bell-chime of \u2013 the opening of the New York Stock Exchange when prospector turned-gold-mining maverick Kenny Wells\u2019 (Matthew McConaughey) company gains 70 points on Initial Public Offering. In other words, it is the accompaniment to a change in wind, the realization of the promise of capitalism, an intoxicating noise, the materialization of fortune. Gold<\/em> is a story about just that, the lust for success becomes all-consuming, Wells himself becomes so consumed by his success that he can\u2019t see the wood for the trees (ironically since Wells\u2019 success begins with upheaving an Indonesian Rainforest) nor who truly is friend or foe. The story is based on the rise and fall of Bre-X Minerals Ltd, a ludicrous venture exposed by the death of geologist Michael de Guzman and tests of gold samples from the Busang site in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, revealing \u201cinsignificant amounts of gold\u201d[2]<\/a> extant in Bre-X Minerals’ product. Share prices plummeted amidst a mass sell-off and, well, capitalism took its toll.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gold<\/em> provides a story of capitalism at its worst, there are lessons to be learnt but those are not so relevant to my Project as they are to a study of the resilience of stock markets to crises whether major fraud or global pandemic. Though the way Pemberton describes his soundtrack is oddly familiar to the feelings I experienced whilst listening to another film\u2019s score, that of There Will Be Blood<\/em>. The aforementioned film tells the story of Daniel Plainview\u2019s (Daniel Day Lewis) rise to power and success through oil drilling in California and, eventually, across America. Plainview is himself a far smarter and more successful character than Wells, his fortune fully realized and absolute in depth, but he himself has become psychotic and obsessed with retaining that wealth, a mere shell of the person he was at the start of the film. Plainview\u2019s relationships are key to his fall: his adoption of the orphaned child of one of his drilling colleagues; and the \u2018adoption\u2019 of religion for the sake of gaining access to the rich drilling sites he coveted in Little Boston, California. The film encourages an interesting cross-section analysis on capitalism\u2019s isolating effect on the individual, as seen by the end of the film where Plainview is successful but alone in a barren mansion; and, \u201ca biblical parable about America\u2019s failure to square religion and greed\u201d[3]<\/a>. This is especially important because of the relationship between Daniel Plainview and Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), the pastor of the \u2018Church of the Third Revelation\u2019 who baptizes Daniel in exchange for rights to drill the land around his newly founded church, payed for by Plainview\u2019s exploitation of the land and its people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both Gold<\/em> and There Will Be Blood<\/em> provide very interesting commentaries on the worst aspects of Capitalism\u2019s toll on the individual, but do not necessarily show the processes and relationships that shape the fabric of a typically ‘modern’ capitalist society. ‘Abstractions\u2019 of the capitalist economy are intricate and effervescent, and while I write my project, I have to consider why capitalism has this image in popular culture of being so corrupting and destructive in light of both classical theory (Marx, the Annales) and modern reappraisals (Piketty, Slater). Though I would stress this above all: an analysis of \u2018capitalism\u2019 is not what I want my Project to be, instead, I want to make this an analysis of people. Though I want to focus on \u2018transnational transactions\u2019 as a clear methodological and historiographical vice for my analysis, at the center of my study is the relationship between people, at first, a brief analysis of the relationship between Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon; then a commentary on Cold-War communities. Transactions are both figurative and practical, what sort of ideological transactions occur between these communities through the exchange of goods and commodities like Pepsi Cola and Soviet Vodka? How has the Cold War Era fallen prey to historiography\u2019s inherent factionalism, and has this distorted our ability to discern a true \u2018Global History\u2019 from the transnational consumer culture that developed between 1959 and 1986? These are just some of the questions that build the framework for my study at current. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Obviously, I will imminently have to read further into 3 key texts that I consider to form a crucial understanding of transnational interpretative history: the newly acquired Consumer Culture & Modernity<\/em> by Don Slater; Capital And Ideology<\/em> by Thomas Piketty; and Global Interdependence: The World after 1945<\/em> by Akira Iriye. What I learnt from There Will Be Blood<\/em> in particular though \u2013 apart from Daniel Day Lewis truly being one of the greatest actors of our time \u2013 is the \u2018stickiness’ of capitalism on Daniel Plainview. This being appropriate as an analogy when seeing his lonesome being dirty and alone at the start of the film, and despite his enormous success through the film, dirty and alone at the very end. When placed in the context of the modernization theorist\u2019s \u2018modern\u2019 and \u2018traditional\u2019 societal frameworks, an interesting though not typically addressed question arises: what \u2018sticks\u2019 once a \u2018traditional\u2019 society transforms into a \u2018modern\u2019 society? Is it appropriate to frame transformative processes in the USSR between 1959 and 1986 in this context, and being mitigated through the transnational transactions with the West (externally)? Or, were the true transformative processes an internalized process of change merely instigated by the triumph of Pepsi Cola? Is the historiography around ANEM in 1959 reflective of a socially conscious move away from arbitrary adversarialism, if not then why? Why bother having America present it\u2019s case for a consumer-centered capitalist economy to the USSR in the first place? I tried thinking of a quip comment on how this project is like laying an oil pipeline, but I think I should get to reading Upton Sinclair\u2019s 1927 novel Oil!<\/em> \u2013 the book which There Will be Blood<\/em> was largely based on \u2013 before daring to do so. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

[1]<\/a> https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/sounds\/play\/m0006fgl .<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[2]<\/a> Schneider, Howard (May 18, 1997). “A Lode of Lies: How Bre-X Fooled Everyone”. Washington Post Foreign Service. p. H01.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[3]<\/a> “Nonesuch Records Times (UK), Evening Standard Give “There Will Be Blood” Five Stars”. Retrieved 11 January 2017<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Started 08\/04\/20] During an interview with BBC Radio Classics, composer Daniel Pemberton discussed how one track for his score to the motion picture Gold essentially operates as \u201cthe quintessential sound of capitalism\u201d[1]. The track, \u2018At the Sound of the Bell\u2019,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5wNtZ-ty","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1832"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1841,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1832\/revisions\/1841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}