Post by spanishspy on Feb 11, 2016 3:23:29 GMT
Some time ago in the AH.com Social Thread I promised a 'long and incoherent rant' about a certain movie. This is said rant.
DISCLAIMER - This rant is not meant to be taken completely seriously. There is a distinct humorous exaggeration present in this piece. I am not actually a conspiracy theorist.
About a week and a half ago I had the interesting experience of a fourteen hour bus ride to Montreal up the eastern coast of North America. I was attending a collegiate Model United Nations conference at McGill University. As one might guess, the long ride required us to entertain ourselves.
To do so, the delegation brass decided to put on a movie, the only movie ever made with Model United Nations as a premise:
Mary Kate and Ashley: Winning London.
Being tired, jumpy (after sitting on a bus from Virginia to upstate New York, it happens), and my nutjob, somewhat delusional self, I watched this movie and a few things stuck out to me.
Firstly, this movie is the epitome of the hackneyed schlock that society considers young adult fiction. It has every trope, hook, line, and sinker. It is something I detested in high school and something I detest now. Relationships between characters are of the most stereotyped nature, and stupidly shallow. The girls are attracted to the elite British boy because of his accent and his stature, and some degree of charm that does not come across to me as charm. The conflicts are the mundane and the archetypical; boys, dances, and social approval, in other words the very same harmful ideas about adolescent girls that people are too lazy to do anything other than reduce these people to caricatures.
On a similar note (that I consider this to be a function of the previous point), this movie sexualizes the girls, no older than perhaps sixteen, to hell and back. There are several shots that I am forced to conclude were made to emphasize, for lack of a suitable and non-prurient alternative, womanhood. I consider this first and foremost lazy, because they couldn’t possibly find another way to make this train wreck of a movie interesting otherwise, and secondly somewhat misogynistic for reasons that have been elaborated in a plethora of gender theoretical works.
Some fellow with less than entirely appropriate tastes is pleasuring himself, energetically, to this movie. I do not consider such an achievement wholly admirable.
Secondly, did these people even do any research about Model United Nations? For one thing, they seem to treat this activity like any other high school competition, with a state governing board and the like; the movie opens up with the girls at what purports to be the California state competition. This is so blatantly wrong I don’t know where exactly to begin. Model United Nations, at least in the United States, is a very decentralized activity whose rules exist solely by consensus. Conferences are not lorded over by a governing body; they are run by the schools and other institutions that run them. One conference’s secretariat (the people in charge) has utterly no bearing on any other conference.
Next, they fabricate out of thin air a bracketlike system of competition, where those than win a competition (which is not how it works) get to go to a higher stage of competition. As I said in the last paragraph, Model United Nations is extremely decentralized, with hardly anything enforceable between one conference and the next. It is convention, not regulation, that drives standardization in this little world.
And the conference. The actual sessions are nothing like parliamentary procedure as it actually exists, and the whole enterprise is some bizarre mishmash of a general assembly and a crisis committee, the two major types of committees. The opening session portrays writing resolutions as some sort of competition on an individual scale; the reality is that they are collaborative efforts that can take a dreadfully long time, which pass after long spiels of different sides saying more or less the same thing over and over again.
The most egregiously bizarre (yet admittedly somewhat realistic; strange things happen at MUN conferences) was when some delegates were
kidnapped by terrorists in a simulated hostage crisis, and the rest had to negotiate with them. This has happened under certain conditions in the MUN world (I’ve borne witness to a few), but never, never, in the conditions that I have ever seen. Never has it been a conference-wide (another flaw of the movie; the conference is a monolithic entity rather than a series of committees operating more or less independently) sponsored event.
The solution to such a hostage crisis was for some delegates to take unilateral action to rescue the hostages, rather than building consensus with the terrorists. Thinking about this, and this movie’s 2001 release, I am forced to conclude that this movie was made in collaboration with the Bush administration to promote the unilateralist foreign policy that would eventually lead to the invasion of Iraq. The film’s setting in mostly London promotes the ‘special relationship’ between the United States and United Kingdom, which would facilitate the cooperation between the Bush Administration and the Blair government in the invasion.
But perhaps most importantly, the message of that scene with the freeing of the hostages is that consensus and negotiation are useless. As the committee meanders without reaching an agreement with the terrorists, the plucky protagonists are ones who say to hell with negotiations. They literally do not negotiate with terrorists, and this course of action is successful, with the freeing of their hostages. This is a direct parallel with the eventual unilateralist policy espoused by the Bush administration and Blair government that would authorize the invasion of Iraq. This serves to make such views and actions in the minds of young girls acceptable, and that they would support the administration in any future interventionist action (e.g. Libya).
With all that said, I think this movie is a travesty. A naked, shameless travesty. It mocks Model United Nations and young girls and promotes a distinctly anti-consensus method of action. This is not diplomacy. I can’t say I know what it is, but it is not diplomacy. The release of this film is said to have heralded greater popularity for Model United Nations among young girls in the early 2000s; I can only hope that they were satisfied, because this film is not a good representation of it at all.
DISCLAIMER - This rant is not meant to be taken completely seriously. There is a distinct humorous exaggeration present in this piece. I am not actually a conspiracy theorist.
About a week and a half ago I had the interesting experience of a fourteen hour bus ride to Montreal up the eastern coast of North America. I was attending a collegiate Model United Nations conference at McGill University. As one might guess, the long ride required us to entertain ourselves.
To do so, the delegation brass decided to put on a movie, the only movie ever made with Model United Nations as a premise:
Mary Kate and Ashley: Winning London.
Being tired, jumpy (after sitting on a bus from Virginia to upstate New York, it happens), and my nutjob, somewhat delusional self, I watched this movie and a few things stuck out to me.
Firstly, this movie is the epitome of the hackneyed schlock that society considers young adult fiction. It has every trope, hook, line, and sinker. It is something I detested in high school and something I detest now. Relationships between characters are of the most stereotyped nature, and stupidly shallow. The girls are attracted to the elite British boy because of his accent and his stature, and some degree of charm that does not come across to me as charm. The conflicts are the mundane and the archetypical; boys, dances, and social approval, in other words the very same harmful ideas about adolescent girls that people are too lazy to do anything other than reduce these people to caricatures.
On a similar note (that I consider this to be a function of the previous point), this movie sexualizes the girls, no older than perhaps sixteen, to hell and back. There are several shots that I am forced to conclude were made to emphasize, for lack of a suitable and non-prurient alternative, womanhood. I consider this first and foremost lazy, because they couldn’t possibly find another way to make this train wreck of a movie interesting otherwise, and secondly somewhat misogynistic for reasons that have been elaborated in a plethora of gender theoretical works.
Some fellow with less than entirely appropriate tastes is pleasuring himself, energetically, to this movie. I do not consider such an achievement wholly admirable.
Secondly, did these people even do any research about Model United Nations? For one thing, they seem to treat this activity like any other high school competition, with a state governing board and the like; the movie opens up with the girls at what purports to be the California state competition. This is so blatantly wrong I don’t know where exactly to begin. Model United Nations, at least in the United States, is a very decentralized activity whose rules exist solely by consensus. Conferences are not lorded over by a governing body; they are run by the schools and other institutions that run them. One conference’s secretariat (the people in charge) has utterly no bearing on any other conference.
Next, they fabricate out of thin air a bracketlike system of competition, where those than win a competition (which is not how it works) get to go to a higher stage of competition. As I said in the last paragraph, Model United Nations is extremely decentralized, with hardly anything enforceable between one conference and the next. It is convention, not regulation, that drives standardization in this little world.
And the conference. The actual sessions are nothing like parliamentary procedure as it actually exists, and the whole enterprise is some bizarre mishmash of a general assembly and a crisis committee, the two major types of committees. The opening session portrays writing resolutions as some sort of competition on an individual scale; the reality is that they are collaborative efforts that can take a dreadfully long time, which pass after long spiels of different sides saying more or less the same thing over and over again.
The most egregiously bizarre (yet admittedly somewhat realistic; strange things happen at MUN conferences) was when some delegates were
kidnapped by terrorists in a simulated hostage crisis, and the rest had to negotiate with them. This has happened under certain conditions in the MUN world (I’ve borne witness to a few), but never, never, in the conditions that I have ever seen. Never has it been a conference-wide (another flaw of the movie; the conference is a monolithic entity rather than a series of committees operating more or less independently) sponsored event.
The solution to such a hostage crisis was for some delegates to take unilateral action to rescue the hostages, rather than building consensus with the terrorists. Thinking about this, and this movie’s 2001 release, I am forced to conclude that this movie was made in collaboration with the Bush administration to promote the unilateralist foreign policy that would eventually lead to the invasion of Iraq. The film’s setting in mostly London promotes the ‘special relationship’ between the United States and United Kingdom, which would facilitate the cooperation between the Bush Administration and the Blair government in the invasion.
But perhaps most importantly, the message of that scene with the freeing of the hostages is that consensus and negotiation are useless. As the committee meanders without reaching an agreement with the terrorists, the plucky protagonists are ones who say to hell with negotiations. They literally do not negotiate with terrorists, and this course of action is successful, with the freeing of their hostages. This is a direct parallel with the eventual unilateralist policy espoused by the Bush administration and Blair government that would authorize the invasion of Iraq. This serves to make such views and actions in the minds of young girls acceptable, and that they would support the administration in any future interventionist action (e.g. Libya).
With all that said, I think this movie is a travesty. A naked, shameless travesty. It mocks Model United Nations and young girls and promotes a distinctly anti-consensus method of action. This is not diplomacy. I can’t say I know what it is, but it is not diplomacy. The release of this film is said to have heralded greater popularity for Model United Nations among young girls in the early 2000s; I can only hope that they were satisfied, because this film is not a good representation of it at all.
