I watched this movie called Blackberry. It aspires to be more intelligent than it’s trope ridden peers that present corporate machinations as heroic struggles. As far as I know, we’ve had movies about Cheetos and a line of Nike shoes this year.
Would it surprise you to learn that the Nike movie makes little mention of the slave trade and sweat shops it uses to make its shoes? Or that the movie never stops to consider that it’s mythologising a few industrial parasites that make disposable, unremarkable shoes that clutter landfills in the third world? Of course not!
The Blackberry movie avoids this dull idolising of fads by imbibing a certain amount of cynicism. It’s clear that these aren’t exceptional people, just ruthless cutthroats around at the right time. Indeed the fall of Blackberry is attributed to a Co-CEO being more interested in Hockey and a dim witted attempt at becoming a sports magnate than his cash cow.
However there’s a theme throughout the movie that presents using Chinese manufacturing as an act of selling out. It also presents it’s leads, as principled in their provincial Canandianness.
At best this is a lazy trope, at worst this is the movie grasping at a greater political consciousness.
It doesn’t work because the recurring theme of the poor quality of Chinese manufacturing has little to do with the quality of Chinamen. It is simple because ruthless elites, like the ones the movie follows, just cared about the bottom line and did not care if the what was delivered was faulty. Indeed more blame should go to these top men than to the manufacturing. A rather important point the movie fails to make.
If I were to also try reaching a greater political consciousness, I would say the movie does not make this point in a clear way because that would mean reckoning with the fundamental nature of both industry and industrialists in the Anglosphere. Apple, the usurper in this tale, has always delivered a quality (if restrictive) user experience and manufacturing deeply in the embrace of the Chinese mainland. So irreplaceable is the quality of Chinese industry that Apple’s attempt to shift away from the mainland has long been floundering despite many would be oracles predicting its imminent transportation to other less threatening eastern powers.
While Anglo-Oligarchs launder and obscure their dependance and lost ground even when it comes to high end manufacturing to the mainland, the rhetoric of the Anglosphere is what I’m taking issue with. In the Neo-liberal order, the furtherest left a mainstream politician and artist can go is to spout trope after trope about the outsourcing of jobs without a care to blame the people who outsourced the jobs. It is so easy to find menacing perils to the South and East but the Oligarchs receive only the phantom of blame. So much for the long championed western republican tradition! It has fallen into secrecy and denial when it comes to the most powerful, lacking even the strength to notice its impotence.
The dramatic stakes in the story are a result of personal follies but more importantly from a system on the brink. One gamble after an another is the only thing that offers momentum and success to anyone on screen. If they ever stopped for honesty or principle they would fail immediately. Even climbing the top is no guarantee of security. Without the colonies, cheap labour and a declining rate of profit it seems like the western finance capital has just gamblers betting till their luck runs out. It’s the fag end of the neo-liberal promise, so why agonise about China? They’re the only ones keeping the system running.
Rijul Ballal 