We Spin Around the Night Consumed by the Fire (In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni)

I will make no concessions to the public in this film.

I believe there are several good reasons for this decision,

and I am going to state them.

In the first place, it's well known that I've never made any concessions...

to the dominant ideas or ruling powers of my era.

Moreover, nothing of importance has ever been communicated...

by being gentle with a public,

not even one like that of the age of Pericles;

and in the frozen mirror of the screen...

the spectators are not looking at anything that might suggest...

the respectable citizens of a democracy.

But most importantly:

this particular public, which has been so totally deprived of freedom...

and which has tolerated every sort of abuse,

deserves less than any other to be treated gently.

The advertising manipulators,

with the usual impudence of those who know that people tend to justify

whatever affronts they don’t avenge,

calmly declare that “People who love life go to the cinema.”

But this life and this cinema are equally paltry,

which is why it hardly matters if one is substituted for the other.

The movie-going public,

which has never been very bourgeois and which is scarcely any longer working-class,

is now recruited almost entirely from a single social stratum,

though one that has been considerably enlarged...

the stratum of low-level skilled employees in the various “service” occupations...

that are so necessary to the present production system:

management, control, maintenance, research, teaching,

propaganda, entertainment, and pseudocritique.

Which suffices to give an idea of what they are.

This public that still goes to the movies also, of course,

includes the young of the same breed who are merely at the apprenticeship...

stage for one or another of these functions.

From the realism and the achievements of this splendid system,

one could already infer the personal capacities of the underlings...

it has produced.

Misled about everything,

they can only spout absurdities based on lies...

these poor wage earners who see themselves as property owners,

these mystified ignoramuses who think they’re educated,

these zombies with the delusion that their votes mean something.

How harshly the mode of production has treated them!

With all their “upward mobility” they have lost the little they had

and gained what no one wanted.

They share poverties and humiliations from all the past systems of exploitation

without sharing in the revolts against those systems.

In many ways they resemble slaves,

because they are herded into cramped habitations

that are gloomy, ugly and unhealthy;

ill-nourished with tasteless and adulterated food;

poorly treated for their constantly recurring illnesses;

under constant petty surveillance;

and maintained in the modernized illiteracy...

and spectacular superstitions...

that reinforce the power of their masters.

For the convenience of present-day industry,

they are transplanted far from their own neighborhoods or regions

and concentrated into new and hostile environments.

They are nothing but numbers on charts drawn up by idiots.

They die in droves on the freeways,

and in each flu epidemic...

and each heat wave,

and with each mistake of those who adulterate their food,

and each technical innovation profitable to the numerous entrepreneurs...

for whose environmental developments they serve as guinea pigs.

Their nerve-racking conditions of existence...

produce physical, intellectual, and psychological degeneration.

They are always spoken to like obedient children...

always willing to do what they’re told...

as long as they’re told that they “must” do it.

But above all they are treated like retarded children,

forced to accept the delirious gibberish

of dozens of recently concocted paternalistic specializations,

which one day tell them one thing...

and the next day perhaps the very opposite.

Separated from each other by the general loss of...

any language capable of describing reality...

(a loss which prevents any real dialogue),

separated by their relentless competition...

in the conspicuous consumption of nothingness

and thus by the most groundless and eternally frustrated envy,

they are even separated from their own children,

who in previous eras were the only property of those possessing nothing.

Control of these children is taken from them at an early age...

these children who are already their rivals,

who laugh at their parents’ blatant failure

Understandably despising their origin,

they feel more like offspring of the reigning spectacle than of...

the particular servants of the spectacle who happen to have begotten them,

and think of themselves as only half-castes of such slaves.

Behind the façade of simulated rapture...

among these couples and their progeny...

there is nothing but looks of hatred.

But these privileged workers of a totally commodified society

differ from slaves in that they themselves must provide for...

their own upkeep.

In this regard they are more like serfs,

because they are exclusively attached to some particular company and dependent

on its successful functioning, without receiving anything in return; and...

especially because they are compelled to reside within a single space:

the same circuit of ever-identical dwelling units, offices, freeways,

vacation spots, and airports.

But they also resemble modern proletarians...

in the precariousness of their means of support,

which conflicts with the continual spending to which they have been conditioned;

and in the fact that they have to hire themselves out on an open market

without owning the instruments of their labor.

They need money to buy commodities,

because things have been so arranged that they have...

no enduring access to anything that has not been commodified.

But in their economic situation they are more like peons,

in that they are no longer left even the momentary handling of the money

around which their entire activity revolves.

They have to spend it immediately

because they don’t receive enough to save.

But even so, sooner or later they find themselves obliged to consume on credit;

and the credit they are granted is docked from their pay,

forcing them to work even more to free themselves from debt.

Since the distribution of goods is totally interlinked...

with the organization of production and the state,

their rations of food and of space are reduced...

in both quantity and quality.

Though nominally remaining free workers and consumers,

they are scorned everywhere and have no real possibility of redress.

I am not going to fall into the simplistic error...

of equating the condition of these high-ranking wage slaves...

with previous forms of socio- economic oppression.

First of all because,

if one leaves aside their surplus of false consciousness and...

their purchase of two or three times,

as much of the miserable junk that constitutes virtually the entire market,

it is clear that they share the same sad life...

as all the other wage earners of today.

It's, in fact, with the naive hope of distracting attention from this annoying reality that so...

many of them jabber so much about how uneasy they feel about living in the lap...

of luxury while people in distant lands are crushed by destitution.

Another reason not to confuse them with the unfortunates of the past...

is that their social position has certain unmistakably modern traits.

For the first time in history,

we are seeing highly specialized economic professionals who,

outside their work, have to do everything for themselves.

They drive their own cars,

and are beginning to have to personally fill them with gasoline;

they do their own shopping and their own so-called cooking;

they serve themselves in the supermarkets...

and in the entities that have replaced railroad dining cars.

It may not have taken them very long...

to obtain their flimsy “professional qualifications,”

but after they have put in their allotted hours of specialized work

they still have to do everything else with their own hands.

Our era has not yet managed to supersede the family,

or money, or the division of labor;

yet one could say that these people have already been...

almost totally deprived of their practical reality...

through sheer dispossession.

Those who never had any substance have lost it for the shadow.

The illusory nature of the riches that the present society claims to distribute

would have been amply demonstrated...

(had it not already been evident in so many other respects)

by the simple fact that never before has a system of tyranny

maintained its lackeys, its experts, and its court jesters so shabbily.

They work overtime in the service of emptiness,

and emptiness rewards them with coinage in its own image.

This is the first time that poor people have imagined themselves

to be part of an economic elite,

despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Not only do these miserable spectators work,

nobody else works for them,

least of all the people they pay.

Even their retailers regard themselves rather as their overseers,

judging whether or not they are sufficiently fervent...

in snapping up the ersatz goods they have the duty to buy.

Nothing can hide the built-in obsolescence of all their possessions

the rapid deterioration not only of their material goods,

but even of their legal rights to the few properties they may own.

They have received no inheritance,

and they will leave none.

Since the cinema public needs more than anything...

to face these bitter truths, which concern it so intimately

but which are so widely repressed,

it cannot be denied that a film that for once...

renders it the harsh service...

of revealing that its problems are not so mysterious as it imagines,

nor even perhaps so incurable...

if we ever manage to abolish classes and the state...

it cannot be denied that such a film has at least that one virtue.

It will have no other.

This public, which likes to pretend that it is a connoisseur of everything

while it in fact does nothing but justify everything it's been forced to undergo,

passively accepting the constantly increasing repugnance...

of the food it eats, the air it breathes,

and the dwellings it inhabits...

this public grumbles about change only when it affects the cinema...

to which it has become accustomed.

And in fact this is the only one of its habits that seems to have been respected.

For a long time I have been perhaps the only person to offend it in this domain.

All the other filmmakers,

even those who are up-to-date enough to echo a few issues already made...

fashionable by the press,

continue to presume the innocence of this public,