(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The True Cost
Directed by Andrew Morgan
When an advertisement tries to sell you its product, it not only aims to link that product to a positive lifestyle, but tends to make it invisible to its complex and specific history. Even more important than that create a story around the product, it is often essential to cut its roots, hide its historical basis. How often does not a product appear as an ethereal and ahistorical object, a novelty without a tangible origin? How often does not a product appear as an apolitical result produced by the market's logic and the individual's internal needs?
Like propaganda, advertising is an expert on polishing reality, smoothing out its unevenness and portraying it idealistically, that is, from its ideology. Advertising and propaganda find its aesthetic in showing something and holding back a lot – it tends to portray the world as a background without a background. In any case, it shows at least the background that gives the product a positive value and aura in the present. The rest is cut away from the product world. In the commercial, the real world has entered the product's polished now, purged of any problematic endeavor that has produced it. In advertising, the world is adapted to one image with no origin other than the logo's timeless Logos.
Media professor Mark Miller believes it's important to acknowledge that advertising is a category under propaganda. And this doesn't just have to do with showing something and holding back a lot; Advertising, like propaganda, is also good at producing reality. Miller refers to the influential promoter Earnest Elmo Hawkins, who talked about two types of products: the things you use over a long time, like a washing machine or a car, and the things you use up, like chewing gum and cigarettes. Consumerism, Miller argues, is about getting people to treat the things they use for a long time in the same way they use the things they use up.
Was this what French filmmaker Jean Renoir was referring to when he described advertising as "the cancer of society"? That it not only tends to hide historical conditions and sell an ideology, but that it cultivates a constant spread and multiplication of its mentality – a use-and-throw relationship with the things around one, which really produces nothing more than its own (destructive) proliferation and growth?
As a psychology professor at Knox College, Tim Kasser says, "The reason advertising works is because smart advertisers try to link the consumption of the product to a message that suggests that your needs will be satisfied if you consume this thing." Italian investment manager Guido Brera links this phenomenon to "fast fashion" and a socio-economic reality. What people really need is very expensive – like a home, study, life insurance. On the other hand, we have a form of comfort: that you can buy a new t-shirt for every party or every day, even if you are poor and lack everything you really need.
Suicide Wave. All of these statements, which are not exactly sensational in our time, come from the documentary The true cost. Here, director Andrew Morgan sheds light on a reality hidden behind many precious clothing commercials. More specifically, the film examines how powerful players in the clothing industry – and the modern concept of "fast fashion" – base their success on the systematic exploitation of people in countries such as China, Bangladesh and India.
What are the realities of the expansionary "fast fashion" made possible by globalization? Morgan points to major human disorders. First and foremost it applies to cheap labor in other countries, where people have to work in an unenforceable environment and live far away from their families. It also applies to pesticides for faster growth of fiber, which among other things leads to cancer.
One of the most telling and extreme stories comes from the Punjab region of India, where the use of the pesticide pesticide has led to a sharp increase in birth defects, cancer and psychiatric disorders. Many farmers have also been forced into a situation where they are in debt to large foreign companies, which can thus seize the property. This has led to a huge number of suicides: Farmers enter their land and drink a bottle of pesticide, and neighbors say they found the farmer lying dead among the pesticides. In the last 16 years, there have been more than 250 registered suicides among farmers in India – "the largest suicide wave in human history," says the director.
The workers in Bangladesh appear as unjustified pieces in a system of exploitation, squeezed between local and global slave drivers.
Another reality from Bangladesh also points to another huge problem. Under miserable working conditions, pushed forward by the constant competition of multinational companies, a woman forms an organization and demonstrates. This is met with brutal violence: blows from sticks, chairs and scissors. Even the buildings they sit in carry with them threats of violence and death. The world community heard about this when a building in Savar, the eight-story high-rise Rana Plaza, collapsed and killed more than a thousand people. This happened after workers had reported large cracks in the building.
The True Cost reminds us that large parts of the clothing industry – as an important part of the consumer society – maintain a slave system. The workers in Bangladesh appear as unjustified pieces in a system of exploitation, squeezed between local and global slave drivers. The film wants to inform and remind of a bloody reality that is pondering the fast fashion industry, and which is otherwise rendered invisible by the smoothly polished commercials.
Blood Slit. Andrew Morgan has created an informative talking heads documentary that relies entirely on text information. Potentially expressive and emblematic images – like a man spraying a field and looking around like a hungry, crawling tiger – are used purely illustratively, quickly, as attachments to what is being said. It also doesn't help that the movie uses incredibly conventional, sentimental music to insist that this is sad news, as if the information wasn't enough. Furthermore, the introductory and rounding narrative voice of the director himself feels banal and unnecessarily "propagandistic": "This is a story of greed and fear, power and poverty."
Morgan uses film as an information dissemination medium. Only a few times does he use montage to highlight and summarize the stark contrast and connection between the hysterical, decadent consumer conditions in the West and the dire conditions of life in other countries. A video footage from a surveillance camera in a clothing store, rounding off the montage, gets the nightmare image in Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1978) to act as whispering criticism. Countless people run around gathering clothes as they scream out their bad time, troublesome euphoria, and make the soundtrack a cry of desperation. Morgan relieves this chaos with images from Bangladesh, where the rain drips between quiet nature and a quiet peace between mother and daughter. Soon the mother informs us that she must hand over the daughter to others, and that the harmony is thus short-lived. Time is money, cut off family ties and bloody tiring.
The True Cost is unique in its message: Fast fashion is based on modern slave operation. The film does not give us new pictures to understand this bloody and unjust reality, but informs about the socio-economic roots that the clothing advertisements never show.
Eidsaa Larsen is a film critic in Ny Tid.
endreeid@gmail.com.
