“Give me productivity or give me death,” might have been the byline of this movie, at least for me. And it scared the hell out of me as I listened to the robotic female voice deliver such phrases to the emotionally and spiritually damned, blank-eyed Americans working behind their shiny desks at Jeffers Corporation. Every minute the most unsettling digital beeping jangles everybody’s nerves (characters and viewers alike), and then that same voice announces how many minutes of productivity are left before the weekend.
I suffered an enormous amount of stress from the opening minutes of Visioneers. My chest tightened, my breathing faltered, and I felt the only recourse for me was to take up full-time meditation. And a Thai massage would have made a difference also.
Please draw a picture of the future the way you see it, was another disturbing Jeffers Corp. instruction typed on a sheet of paper. The main character, George Washington Winsterhammerman (played by Galifianakis) ends up getting ‘˜rewarded’ for what he draws as his view of the future. Sitting in my tiny Los Angeles apartment, looking out at the city, listening to the national news, and wondering if this country can ever be a hopeful, happy place again, Visioneers hit me right in the chest, and I still haven’t recovered.
Modern day shaman and psychedelic philosopher, Terence McKenna, said in the 90s, during one of his famous weekend lectures: ” — culture is a shabby lie ‘” or at least, this culture is a shabby lie. I mean, if you work like a dog, you get 260 channels of bad television and a German automobile! What kind of perfection is that? We have our secular society — and consumer object fetishism is the only kind of worth that we collectively recognize. I’m sure you’ve all seen the T-shirt that says ‘˜He’ ‘” notice, he ‘” ‘˜who dies with the most toys, wins.’ That is in fact the banner under which we’re flying here. And — the level of unhappiness is immense. I mean, the level of unhappiness among the poor, they’ve always been miserable; but we’ve managed to create something entirely new in human history ‘” an utterly miserable ruling class!”
Not that George is of the ‘˜ruling class’, but he does live in a spacious house in the countryside, and he owns a yacht. And he is utterly miserable, suffering from stress and a lack of purpose. Despite his toys.
I want to go to sleep and I don’t want to wake up. I will resist that urge, and I will fight sleep for as long as possible. Uppers are relatively easy to get here in L.A., as easy as a phone call, but that doesn’t mean I feel any better about this country, nor can I shake the feeling that the bleakness of this film represents America now. Visioneers came out in 2008.
And Visioneers is supposed to be kind of funny, in a dark, oddball, peculiar way. Why am I so despondent after watching this movie? I know it has something to do with the sterile, unmoving, human-zombie type of worker that Galifianakis plays.
George is a soft spoken, upper middle class, white-collar worker who dutifully shows up at Jeffers Corp. each day. George’s wife is a down and out TV addict, and she gets hooked on a book / TV combo about finding ultimate happiness. The host of the TV show, who reads passages from the books and instructs her viewers on how to be happy reminds me of Oprah. She gushes and she swoons over meaningless phrases and hollow ideas about how people can find true happiness. In the midst of this home / work life, there is no love between George and his wife, and we never see their son, Howard, who is always thought to be in his room.
To add some spice to the characters’ collective drudgery, as they march through their corporate, weekly-paycheck existence, is the ever-rising dread that around the nation humans are exploding. These exploding humans are thought to exhibit certain symptoms before they blow up, and like any good sensational media, the symptoms are listed in a very grave manner, and the symptoms are vague: fatigue, loss of sex drive, habitual eating, etc. As more humans are reported to have exploded, the nightly news raises the alert level of this strange pandemic from some kind of brown color to magenta (an obvious play off the dubious Homeland Security ‘˜terror’ levels).
I don’t think Visioneers is far off the mark in portraying America’s current situation. We’re stuck in a corporate world, a world where we should feel lucky that at least we have a dead end job, and a car, and a house. Never mind that all these items are joyless for the characters and in no way give as much pleasure to equal the stress in acquiring such objects. George breathes heavily throughout the entire movie, his eyes always have a blank sheen (no relation to Charlie), and he runs the race that most Americans are forced to run.
On the weekends, George knows he is supposed to relax and engage in his favorite hobbies, so we see him golfing, and we see him driving his very large and expensive boat, but again, he is without joy. He goes through the motions, because that is what people like him do on the weekend.
George’s brother shows up in George’s backyard and he represents an alternative to the corralled, corporate, production-is-your-God mentality. George’s brother practices pole vaulting all day long. Soon the backyard is full of what might be considered hippies who are all seeking a reprieve to the strangled American culture.
As human explosions hit an all-time high, the U.S. president becomes desperate, and we learn that Jeffers Corporation actually manufactures a device that can be attached to a human’s neck to kill every last emotion in that human. Without emotions, so the belief has it, humans won’t explode.
This device feels like the product of a corporate world getting hold of some strand of eastern belief where all desires are harmful, and emotions are detrimental to human beings. And until we have humans who no longer have a drive for anything, can we have a seriously productive society.
Visioneers is darkly funny, and if you’re like me, you might be tempted to say farewell to this life after watching this film, but I trust you won’t, and I trust we’ll end up being inspired by such a bleak outlook. The movie also ends on a high note. Sunshine finally pokes through the gray setting.
