The Big Kahuna (2000)

This is an interesting movie that compares marketing industrial 
lubricants to preaching Christianity. MIM is with it on that 
point, but we part ways when the movie says that trying to 
convince anyone of anything amounts to the same sell-out thing.

The movie follows three salespeople for an industrial lubricant 
company on the prowl at a convention. Two of them are really 
experienced and third is a naive newby who turns out to be more 
interested in turning people onto God than promoting the company. 
Over the course of the conflict between them, it turns out that 
one of the older guys, played by Kevin Spacey, is just about as 
loyal to the company - though in a cynical way - as the young guy 
is to religion. The third person, played by Danny DeVito, is 
somewhere in between. The company is putting the pressure on to 
get a big sale at the convention, and that pressure is balanced by 
the pressure the religious guy feels to get through to people 
about God.

It's not a bad thing to equate capitalist marketing with preaching 
religion. Both involve generating a need where there may not be 
one, or pitching your product as the answer to someone's need 
whether it really fits or not. So far so good. But in the movie's 
climactic final scenes the point gradually emerges that whatever 
one is selling - God, lubricants, or anything else - the process 
is a scam which undermines humyn discourse.

Thus the movie comes down on the side of postmodernism. And that 
is where we disagree. We think that trying to recruit people to 
revolutionary politics, for example, is not just another sale. 
We're not shuckin' and jivin' when we say that only revolution can 
save the lives of the millions of children who die from starvation 
every year in under capitalism. Struggling with political friends 
and potential comrades over political line, building support for 
revolution -- this is not the same as marketing. 

But the postmodern position, in the name of "real" communication - 
in which everyone is just her or himself and no one tries to 
change anyone else -- liquidates the possibility of communication 
with a direction. The idealist says "free" and "open" 
communication is the ideal. The communist says communication in 
the direction of progressive change is the best communication -- 
indeed, all communication has a direction, like all art is 
political. It supports the status quo, or it opposes it.

In the struggle over ideas that emerges between political forces, 
people are changed. The direction of change is not random. One set 
of ideas wins and another loses. When we pretend that people can 
just be who they "are" we let the status quo, with its domination 
by imperialism and its ideology, reign supreme and unchallenged.

Typical of postmodernism, when it is directed at a real enemy -- 
such as capitalists or Christianity -- its criticism rings true. 
But when you get at its underpinnings you see how it corrodes the 
revolutionary spirit and undermines the real potential for people 
to make change. The Big Kahuna represents both sides of this 
tendency.