Mock Up on Mu

Brooks Landon

doi:10.3828/sfftv.2011.9

Baldwin's own collaged approach to documentary powerfully parallels and thus underscores the critique of copyright and trademark restrictions offered by members of Negativland and by artists associated with the Billboard Liberation Front, the Tape Beatles, Emergency Broadcast Network and the Barbie Liberation Organization - all of whom, in the tradition of the Situationists, appropriate and radically repurpose copyrighted material in their art. While this film loosely advances a plot in which a lone female hero in a post-apocalyptic world resists the residual mind control techniques of corporate media conspiracies, it more insistently reconstructs the history of the 'electromagnetic imaginary' from telephone to radio to TV to internet as it was created by Franklin, Bell, Edison, Tesla and Marconi and then taken over, owned and marketed by corporate pirates such as David Sarnoff and airwave-grabbing corporations such as GE, RCA, NBC, ABC, CBS and Disney. (Baldwin terms himself an 'availablist', explaining 'I use what's on hand', and he compares the 'artifactuality' of his films to the attitude of punk rock.) Mock Up on Mu has been described as 'yet another punk-Hegelian synthesis of his recent stylistic migratory patterns', a 'collage-essay-epic-lyric-narrative', 'a new method of cinematic storytelling', Baldwin's 'wiggiest bargain-basement extravaganza', 'a madcap hyper-meditation on magick and mind control', 'a SciFi agitprop ADD fantasy', 'an allegorical cyclone of images and ideas haunted by sardonic humor and Gnostic longing', 'a clever-to-a-fault retro farrago' and 'a rapid-fire pulp serial-cum-political tract piss take on California's major military, entertain- ment, and religious industries'. In Mock Up on Mu, Baldwin has them alive in the year 2019, when Hubbard, living on his theme park/Scientology rehab center on the moon (Mu), is set on taking over the world, aided by Lockheed Martin's influence in establishing a space shuttle/weapons platform connection between Mu and Las Vegas.

Mock Up on Mu

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