Analysis of Movie Regeneration, Essay Example

The primary thesis of the Ryan Gosling narrated and William Montgomery directed 2010 documentary film Regeneration is that there is an apparent profound apathy in the current generation of American adolescents and young adults in relation to social issues and the social structure in general. Accordingly, the youth are not encouraged to participate in political processes, instead being saturated with various forms of media, to the extent that various speakers throughout the film, such as Noam Chomsky suggest, that it is this consumerist and capitalist culture which has created such a situation of apathy. Accordingly, such apathy on the part of the young generation is precisely the desire of the current political elite, in so far as they wish to maintain their political hegemony. Regeneration thus provides a lucid picture of how a particular political and social ideology functions.

In regards to the first point, Chomsky makes the following point regarding the nexus between media and the young generation in the film. He states: “From a business point of view, the ideal social unit is you and the television set.” (Montgomery, 2010) Here, television set could be substituted with any form of contemporary media: Chomsky’s point is that a capitalist social structure considers this the ideal social unit, because it is construes the individual primarily as a consumer, with the media device bombarding the consumer with products of consumption. Namely, this becomes the definitive and ideal type of social relationship for such a consumerist and capitalist society, since it perpetuates the cycle of consumption.

In so far as the primary theme of the film is that there is an apathy infecting the younger generation, it thus appears clear that apathy is precisely the acceptance of what Chomsky terms the “ideal social unit” of capitalism: it is not a critique of this system, but a submission to it. It is thus a submission to the dominant political ideology of the time. However, at the same time, this dominant political ideology precisely wants this apathy: it does nothing to discourage it. This is tantamount to a desired complicity with the ruling ideology.

Such themes were essentially foreseen in Fukuyama’s infamous book End of History and the Last Man, where he offers the thesis that there exists a “remarkable consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a system of government” (1) after the fall of the Communist Bloc. But who is making this consensus?: the political elite. By participating in only the consumerist structure favored by this ideology, however, young people are also offering an implicit consensus support of such a system. Accordingly, following the arguments of Regeneration, the youth are apathetic in the sense that they accept this form of “social unit”; at the same time however it is the current ruling classes that also want to perpetuate this social unit. This problem is not one found merely in the youth therefore, but also in the entire ideological foundations of Western liberal democracies.

Why is this social structure inadequate? In the film, author and founder of the magazine Adbusters suggests that this social structure, dominated by the electronic media, produces an “empathy deficit.” (Montgomery, 2010) Namely, one cannot see beyond what Chomsky calls the ideal social unit, and since this social unit is founded on a consumerist-product relationship, one overlooks the human-human relationship that is the foundation of empathy. This claim appears wholly legitimate on logical grounds alone, since the political structure is now thought in terms of what is called in the academic literature “homo economicus.” (Tullock, 1994): it is the economic relationship that is the definitive relationship of this ideology, thus producing apathetic individuals.

The film thus does not merely present a case for the apathy of the younger generation: it seeks the causes for this same apathy. The causes for this apathy lie in the ideology of America and Western liberal capitalism itself, a culture that values the consumer relationship as the definitive relationship of humankind. Accordingly, apathy instead of empathy is promoted by this reduction of the human being to his or her consumer form.

Works Cited

Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006.

ReGeneration. Dir. Phillip Montgomery. Red Flag Releasing. 2010. Film.

Tullock, Gordon. On the Trail of Homo Economicus. Washington, DC: George Mason, 1994.