Exorbitant Privilige
What means the essay film in this era of ‘disputed facticity’ and ‘alternative truth’, when media are dominated by two antithetical forces: production increasingly democratised via social media, with consumption occurring within ever tighter, self-selecting filter bubbles that undermine the very grounding of a common public interest?
Using video footage, archival imagery, and computer simulations, ‘Exorbitant Privilege’ argues that the Cold War’s nuclear testing bears a correlative, if not strictly causative, relationship to our present ecological collapse. Intensive home-building and associated mass-consumption were after all stated objectives of US government policy after WWII. Consumerism borne of anti-Communist paranoia, and energised by excessive finance, was in turn exported globally and remains, even ten years after the financial crisis, a central feature of the Capitalocene – a less ‘polite’ but perhaps more precisely aimed term than Anthropocene.
On the other hand, the damage done by the nuclear tests between the 1940s and 1990s, carried out by the US, UK, USSR, and France in nominally remote and ‘uninhabited’ sites such as the Marshall Islands or French Polynesia, is dwarfed in scale by the wholesale destruction of South Pacific marine habitats by sea-level rises and plastic pollution. Even the generous reparations made by the US government to the Marshallese have done little to foster sustainable development, leaving behind a cycle of dependency and despair. Thus, have the exorbitantly privileged holders of capital exercised domain over the earth’s wretched, leaving behind a ‘terminal beach’ of radioactive ash and plastic flotsam.
