Synopsis: A man goes up a big mountain where, in answer to his invocation and in a flood of eerie light, a machine descends from heavens. He brings it down to his compatriots who immediately knock down a bull from the pedestal and start worshipping the Machine. The TV Set, as the machine turns out to be one, is slightly wicked but in a playful way, showing gleeful pictures and playing seemingly innocent pranks on its followers. When one of them accidentally gets killed, another wants to take revenge on the TV set and resorts to violence against it. To stifle possible rebellion, the TV Set undergoes transformation and shows its truly evil side, grows horns and grins like a demon. The pictures it shows also become more vivid, if not terrifying, thus manipulating people’s emotions and so the (oppressive) cult of the Machine is born. The evil festival goes on and on until a thunderstorm in which the TV set gets struck, and in a fit of wild passion/agony, it wreaks havoc among flames and whining sirens. The worshippers keep kowtowing, but to save their fragile lives put on gas masks as if they knew how the seeming apocalipse is going to end. What follows is tragic – a mightier machine appears and shoots down the TV Set – its remains are shoved off into a precipice to share the fate of the bull and other fallen idols.
However, the show must go on and so the story repeats itself and soon the subsequent machine is also replaced by a stronger and better one …
Questions:
Bendito in Spanish means ‘blessed’. Is the machine already blessed with a holy status when it descends to live amongst humans? Or, like in Roman Catholic religion, is beatified upon its death? Or maybe it’s blessed cos it is capable of reincarnating, reinventing itself continuously, each machine being created a better image of the Ubermachine? The question here arises whether this process is never-ending or whether there is some nirvana point to achieve?
Who’s dwelling in the heaven – Is that some Ubermachine or Urmachine, machine-god/god-machine sending its messengers to teach the humans a lesson? If so, is it a loving utopian lesson or a dystopic evil lesson?
There is a striking resemblance between the man praying for the Machine and Moses receiving stone tablets with 10 Commandments on Mount Sinai – the first set of tablets got smashed as the humans didn’t understand fully how great a gift the commandments were. Do we understand the goodness of technology being brought to us or just throw ourselves into senseless consumption, using it unreasonably or even misusing or abusing and thus forcing the technology to turn into an wicked being that attacks us?
The idols replace each others in a quickening succession – isn’t it the time of time accelleration, and does it point to a possibility of exhaustion or will it contrinue into eternity?
Finally, is the machine inherently evil and its sole plan is to deprive us of agency or rather it is us who project our own evilness onto it?
Zero Commandment(s)
With the advent of the internet, information is readily available at little to no cost to produce and distribute. Government restrictions on the types of information shared can be bypassed, and the ‘truth’ will get out. But who’s truth is it? How do we know? Why would the farmer in China who has never been anywhere question his government’s politics if that was all he ever knew? If his government continued to speak out against capitalism, why would he seek to question those beliefs? Even though more information and another ‘truth’ may be available to him, why would he choose to seek that out… unless someone were to show it to him.
Even though the internet allows us access to many viewpoints and many ‘truths’, do we as a culture seek out alternatives to the traditional, or we do simply continue to go with what we know?
