{"id":617,"date":"2007-05-13T21:04:31","date_gmt":"2007-05-13T21:04:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2007\/05\/13\/in_which_i_fail_to_suspend_disbelief\/"},"modified":"2007-05-13T21:04:31","modified_gmt":"2007-05-13T21:04:31","slug":"in_which_i_fail_to_suspend_disbelief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2007\/05\/13\/in_which_i_fail_to_suspend_disbelief\/","title":{"rendered":"In which I fail to suspend disbelief"},"content":{"rendered":"

Those of you who reside in Britain and are staunch Guardian<\/em> readers will be familiar with the DVDs that come free with the Saturday edition. The films on offer are never interesting enough to entice you buy the paper when you wouldn’t otherwise \u2013 with some sort of cinematic karma, for every mildly welcome movie, there’s a particularly naff film like Letter to Brezhnev<\/em> to balance it out. Still, it’s certainly worth a look before chucking each week’s offing into the bin.<\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/p>\n

\nJaap and me, after our cozy nine minutes together<\/strong><\/p>\n

\nThis Saturday’s edition came with a film whose name did not ring any bells. Eureka<\/em>, it was entitled, with the strapline The best ideas come from the most unlikely places<\/em>. God god, could this be about a scientist, some heretofore unrecognized example of ‘lab lit’<\/a>? My heart rate accelerated ever so slightly. The cover showed a wistful, unshaven, vaguely foreign-looking European man staring into the distance, a background of green fields and mountains behind him. A zoologist, perhaps? Or a botanist? So far, so good.<\/p>\n

\nAnd then I saw it: the familiar yellow and red logo in the bottom right-hand corner, and the small white print: ‘a Shell Films Production’.<\/p>\n

\nA what?<\/p>\n

\nFlip over the case. The ‘film’ is in fact only nine minutes long. Under a banner stating this to be a story inspired by real events<\/em>, the synopsis reveals that the story is actually an advert thinly disguised. Chief Shell engineer Jaap van Ballegooijen, who is \u201cpassionate about saving the world’s energy resources\u201d, comes up with an idea for a new technology to drill for inaccessible oil after a chance encounter with his son in Amsterdam. The ‘film’, in fact, is clearly a shameless advertisement packaged as fiction.<\/p>\n

\nWhat the hell, it was only nine minutes \u2013 I couldn’t resist. With swelling music that would not be out of place in a Spielberg production, and Dutch subtitles for the cringe-worthy sequences when the intrepid Jaap has to interact with his teenaged boy, it’s made up to look like an arthouse film. But the acting and dialogue are terrible, and the content is sheer propaganda. A journalist who challenges Jaap’s vision of tapping occluded oil is told sharply that there are two sides to every story. Naturally, Jaap assures her, as he grits his teeth heroically out of the helicopter window, this method of scraping yet more oil from the nearly empty reserves is just to tide us over until alternative fuels are ready. Later, back in Amsterdam, when the Coke-drinking, spotty son complains that his father is always off galavanting in tropical countries instead of watching him play football back home, Jaap sharply retorts that he should grow up: geen olie, geen fris<\/em> (loosely translated as, no oil, no infrastructure that would provide that beverage you’re drinking). <\/p>\n

\nI’m not sure why this DVD annoyed me so much. Maybe it’s because I’ve just returned from an editorial trip to the 29th Symposium on Biotechnology for Fuels and Chemicals<\/a>, where there was a lot of green love in the proverbial room. I guess, mostly, that I am disappointed at the Guardian<\/em> for peddling this infomercial as part of series in which its readers have grown to expect legitimate fiction. Although the warning signs are all over it if you look closely, in no place is it clearly marked ‘advertisement’ (a required notification had the equivalent fare, in essay form, been printed in the actual paper). Fiction, it seems, has become a clever medium for worming around the devices that protect us from taking self-promotion at face value.<\/p>\n

\nOn the lighter side, the DVD also came with extras: a ‘making of’ (all 90 seconds of it) and something alarmingly described as ‘interactive film mind challenges \u2013 creative brain teasers’.<\/p>\n

\nI passed on those, needless to say.<\/p>\n

\n(warning: the link to LabLit.com above constitutes shameless self-promotion)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Those of you who reside in Britain and are staunch Guardian readers will be familiar with the DVDs that come free with the Saturday edition. The films on offer are never interesting enough to entice you buy the paper when … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=617"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}