Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before: Relationships and Late Capitalism in “Hang the DJ”’

The 1960s’ late-modernist style of the chalet recalls a retrofuturistic version of the future, one envisioned in the past and that is already past tense, suggesting that our ability to imagine alternate futures has been foreclosed in the age of late capitalism.

Interestingly, the vast majority of these mainly physical relationships feature Amy and not Frank, who after his joyless experience with Nicola is shown only once more with a partner. Amy, instead, has many relationships which, are for the most part, depicted through short sex scenes, including a montage sequence where five successive partners including implausibly muscled men and a woman dissolve into one another onscreen. The intention here appears to be to parody the representation of women in romantic films, which, though predominantly aimed at a female market, nevertheless cannot resist depicting women through a sexualised male gaze. Here “Hang the DJ” is again knowing in its aims. Earlier still, after she breaks up with Lenny and right before she embarks on a series of purely physical 36 hour relationships, we are presented with a shot of Amy swimming, the water obscuring her head and showing instead only her body. Later, right before she figures the simulation out and elects to flee with Frank, the shot is repeated only this time from above the water, leaving Amy’s head visible, but her body obscured.

While we could argue that Annie Hall’s ending coupled with its deconstruction of narrative form stands as a rebuke to convention, Adorno and Horkheimer are swift to note the culture industry’s ability to assimilate difference, even amongst maverick filmmakers: “Whenever Orson Welles offends against the tricks of the trade, he is forgiven because his departures from the norm are regarded as calculated mutations which serve all the more strongly to confirm the validity of the system (1944, p. 129)”.

Seinfeld incidentally is capitalist television par excellence, with the show’s repeats alone reputedly generating over $3 billion in revenue in the 15 years that followed the airing of its final episode (Sherwin, 2013).

Breaking from Jameson and Terry Eagleton, Hutcheon argued that parody was not essentially depthless, but that “the collective weight of parodic practice suggests a redefinition of parody as repetition with critical distance that allows ironic signaling of difference at the very heart of similarity” (Hutcheon, 1989, p. 185).

Such is revealed in the déjà vu sequence in the film, when Neo’s sense of the uncanny upon seeing a black cat twice in quick succession prefigures an Agent-triggered glitch in the matrix.

See, for example, Oblivion where Cruise stars alongside Olga Kurylenko, or American Made (Doug Liman 2017) where his onscreen wife is played by Sarah Wright.

While filming Eyes Wide Shut, which by 1998 was the longest continuous film shoot on record, Kubrick reportedly insisted on shooting 95 takes of a shot of Cruise walking through a door, while Cruise’s gormless character Dr Bill Harford spends the bulk of the film blankly repeating questions that are put to him and lurching from one calamity to the next (Nicholson, 2014).

Simon Parkin notes: “The capacity for so-called ‘persuasive technology’ to influence behaviour in this way is only just becoming understood, but the power of the dopamine system to alter habits is already familiar to drug addicts and smokers. Every habit-forming drug, from amphetamines to cocaine, from nicotine to alcohol, affects the dopamine system by dispersing many times more dopamine than usual. The use of these drugs overruns the neural pathways connecting the reward circuit to the prefrontal cortex, which helps people to tame impulses. The more an addict uses a drug, the harder it becomes to stop” (2018).

In January 2017, CNN reported that analysis conducted by Oxfam to coincide with that year’s World Economic Forum in Davos found that Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Amancio Ortega, Larry Ellison and Michael Bloomberg’s collective worth totaled a scarcely credible $426 billion, more than the combined wealth of the 3.6 billion people who constitute the poorest half of the world’s population (Kottasova, 2017).

In an exposé on the company’s business practices, the Times reported that “for years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed”. It also “allowed Spotify, Netflix and the Royal Bank of Canada to read, write and delete users’ private messages, and to see all participants on a thread” (Dance, LaForgia, & Confessore, 2018).