ALLEGORY OF WESTERN COMPLICITY IN GENOCIDE?

This is an extremely complex film about exploring several different strands of Western culpability and intellectual discourse while masquerading as a light comedy. Notice the apparently irrelevant closeups on people's extended limbs, the recurrence of the colour mauve, and the constant repetition of the word 'containment'. These three motifs in particular betoken a concern with the Rwandan conflict and the inability of Western governments to act on their own principles due to underlying economic considerations. On a deeper level, i find much of the startling imagery a sort of poetic-visual representation of Walter Benjamin's excursus on Baudelaire, which is nicely counterpointed with several modern day 'arcades', either literally or figuratively, as evidenced by the shadow cast by Carmen Electra's bosom. In the end, on several levels this film offers a surrealistic dreamscape which reveals the superficiality of capitalist intellectual dogma, and it opens up the possibility of an experience transcending the everyday focus on pragmatism, thereby subtly implanting numerous reflections on the Armenian genocide and the involvement of Western governments in the ascendancy of the Shah of Iran in the 1950s. Overall, it is profound, enlightening, a tour de force of intellectual and artistic excellence, and a thought provoking reflection on the abrogation of responsibility by the tradition of engagement and desengagement throughout the discursive progress of Western modernity.