9/1/2020 0 Comments Austin Powers 4 - License to Shag: Chapter 3 - Dr. Evil Gets a Call from Dick Land/The 2005 Evil/Cohn ManifestoDr. Evil still lived his life punctuated by stringed instruments. Compared to the largely empty hyperrealist spaces he had occupied some twenty years ago, his home now was a rathole. There were piles of trash stacked up to the ceiling. His walls were gray, like the walls of yesteryears, but lacked any of those old walls’ sense of industrial and aesthetic impracticality. He had no boardroom, no shark aquarium, no volcanic basement. He only had four walls, a roof, and a green screen to Skype onto Jimmy Fallon with.
The phone rang. A novelty dial-up landline phone sitting on his kitchen counter that he hadn’t heard rung in a few years. He stumbled up from his DX Racer gaming chair to pick it up. “Hello?” Dr. Evil said sarcastically. “Hello,” the voice on the other end said. It was a deep voice with the kind of northern English accent that made you feel pity. “Are you Doctor Dougie Evil?” “I prefer to be called just Dr. Evil,” Dr. Evil said. “Oh, alright, for sure, Dr. Evil. I’m calling because I’m a tenured professor at the philosophy department of Cambridge University and we’re currently doing a class on the Evil/Cohn Revolutionary Model.” “Riiight.” “I was wondering if you could come speak on your 2005 book ‘My Life As A Brother and Nemesis’?” His book was the most important turning point in his life. In about 2005 he contacted an autobiographer named Dr. Mindy Cohn, who had written in depth about Austin and Dr. Evil in the past, commissioning her to co-author a memoir alongside him. She obliged, and what was created was one of the most experimental pieces on the nature of sexuality and society that has ever been written. It took off in many social circles off the beaten path. Here is an excerpt from the book: “When one inspects the nature of the phallic object one finds virility and strength, otherwise exemplified as the fluid ‘mojo’. The media no doubt assumed my want to communicate this virility when my infamous rocket flew over the heads of the entire Western hemisphere. But this was never my intention. It was a poorly designed mistake. What desire should I have to expose myself to the world? This kind of constant reference to the phallic object is exactly what diminishes its power. Austin Powers, my brother and former enemy, is a perfect example of someone who seeks, for whatever reason, be it in good or bad faith, to create a world in which the phallic object is every day. We see this all around us, do we not? “The Swinging 60s”, “free-love”? These movements, while surely good intentioned, had to die out. “The Big Boy I orbited Earth in for many years is what I feel my true self must be, and just the same what I seek to prevent the world from becoming. A vacuous but almost permanent symbol of innocence. An externalization and abstraction of the production of what makes your very existence. The obscene dream sold when you see the small man holding a burger is this: ‘Eat and be full.’ There is no mention of sex, no mention of the birth of cows and the grinding of their meat. Only the product. This is an important concept to my theory. I call this “Product without Ingredients”, after the Deleuzian Body without Organs, but do not be confused by its name. The Body with Organs is exactly what the Product without Ingredients conceals; they are opposite concepts. There is no wild, unadulterated and uncivilized spirit of mojo since our culture downloaded the Product without Ingredients meme. “What I sought to offer, in my constant assaults on the United Nations and United States Government, was a view of a plan for revolution which cannot function. You cannot simply threaten to blow up the world, you cannot simply kill everyone who disagrees with you. My plans are the application of Product without Ingredient thinking to revolutionary matters. “You may think: ‘Dr. Evil, did Austin not advocate for a peaceful revolution?’ I say: Throw me a frickin’ bone here. If my actions offer a view of Product without Ingredient thinking applied to failure, Austin provides a view of its widespread success for leeches. Austin, who until being frozen past the dissolution of the USSR very much sympathized with Socialist and Communist countries and attitudes, has for the past seven years never sought to interrogate the way that his former worldview has dissolved. He believes that his judiciary status as the world’s “International Man of Mystery” is a righteous and non-political one. This is why I speak of the Product without Ingredients. When you assume all individual products under capitalism build toward enormous societal products, say the IMF or the WTO, you learn that this product’s interdependency gives its ingredients and vice versa. There is really no product, only vertical chains of ingredients. What is iceberg lettuce if not a part of a hamburger? What is Fergie if not a member of the Black Eyed Peas? And simultaneously: what is a burger without lettuce? What is the Black Eyed Peas without Fergie? “Worse yet if you foolishly believe you are not a product or an ingredient, but a Deleuzian Body without Organs, as Austin does. There is no Body without Organs in our modern capitalist society, and the proof is Austin’s domesticity after arriving here and acclimating himself with our customs. An individual escape from this system is impossible. My lairs are recreations of things which have never once existed. Austin is the same. “This Product without Ingredients perspective displays why a show of force against concepts as ill-defined as monogamy or governmental coalitions do not accomplish any real revolutionary change. A moon laser does not work to cause any collapse of existing structures. At the same time, neither does Austin Powers’ cultivation of his personal mojo. “Do you see how Gaddafi’s recent attempt to establish an African monetary fund subverts this thinking? I applaud his revolutionary ideal of a competing system which vies for power while still structured within the rigged and broken neocolonialist model. It may prove to provide for the entire continent of Africa following its overthrow of the supposedly civilized West which colonized, abandoned, and still exploits it. The recent privatization of Libya’s oil further proves this. A revolutionary of the 20th century might say that this is reformism. But what exactly would happen if the people of Libya revolted, simply stormed the gates of their parliament and killed Gaddafi? Would they have prepared a robust and empowering, but simple enough alternative which could be followed through in the face of the guns of global capital? “I should clarify: although they are ideal for Africa’s economic situation, Gaddafi’s solutions cannot be earnestly followed through with around the world. In the West, where wealth is ever present and always out of reach, the worship of popular culture and technology blinds our judgement. We have long-since lost our cultural mojo. Most men these days do not even know that mojo is a real, physical substance. They think it is an abstracted metaphor for some antiquated sexual expression when it is really the very thing which allows for cultural advancement. “No doubt you have noticed I am a simple man. Every time I attempt a heist or blackmail, I do the exact same thing. This is an essential part of my worldview. The dominant ideology of the world is that complexity offers us greater and greater things. This is flawed, but we cannot deny that without our incredibly complex gadgets such as CCTV cameras and time machines we would be worse off. Where we fail is with the fetishization of these objects. These objects have become, in absence of any meaningful phallic or vaginal symbol, the new fixation of our libidinal energy. This is the core of my hyperrealist aesthetic: a physical externalization of an ideal Modesty. The constant maintenance of modesty in society likewise maintains our phallic objects as the healthy objects of our desires. Each object in my lair is only observed when it is to be used. This is Modesty. “Many people would interpret this as a want to end the sexual aspects of swinging culture. No. Modesty does not mean the end of mojo, which is the very thing it protects, nor does Modesty mean an eradication of polygamy, homosexuality, or sodomy. It means that you zip it. Shh! Zip it. Zippy. YKK on your... Zip it! Zip me baby one more time..? “We have already lost the culture war, which no one else in the world was ever even fighting. I have no hope for a society which has casted Kevin Spacey in a film adaptation of what is ostensibly my least revolutionary and most compromised of evil schemes. In fact, I see the commodification of my struggle as a final signal to the world from the elite: ‘We have lost our ability to refute even a man with a plan as ridiculously simple and implausible as Dr. Evil’s. We must legitimize our version of his ideals into our culture or die.’ My constant urge to be hip has long-since destroyed my reliability as a political leader. I have no mojo. I have the opposite of mojo. My success in the media is my greatest source of hope for those who do. “Ask yourself this: If I have been minutes away from destroying the world four or five times with such rudimentary and simple plans, what is to stop any group of people from throwing out the old regimes and installing a new system? The only acceptable answer is that there is no attempt to download a new system beforehand. Developing societies like China and Mexico, who have technology but have still maintained their native traditions and can recover from their colonized economic systems, will inherit the frickin’ Earth.” Dr. Evil did not write this book. He neither had anything to do with it nor did he ever end up reading it, but he was living off of its royalty checks, so what did it matter. He did one short interview with the ghostwriter, who bounced some words off of him and wrote down a few of his speech patterns, then the entire thing was out of his head completely. “Oh, yeah, for sure,” Dr. Evil said. “I can come speak on it. Yah.” “Great,” the professor said, smiling like an ape on the other side of the phone. “Wow! And do you happen to know where Cohn is? We were hoping we could get her to give a lecture as well.” “Hm. Cohn...” Dr. Evil thought for a moment. He scrunched his forehead up with some feigned compassion. “I think I might have fired her.” “Fired her?” “Yes. Out of a cannon? Muahahahaha. Muahahahaha. Muahahahaha.”
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
September 2021
Categories |