MIM Notes 217 
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.