In And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine, a documentary that reflects on the evolution of image creation and the effects it has had on society, the presence of the Swede Ruben Östlund as its producer stands out. The satirical discourse of a good part of his filmography, seeking and displaying a constant feeling of ridicule, grace, ingenuity and excesses of many current realities, warns us of what Axel Danielson and Maximilien van Aertryck are going to want to tell us before even starting to show images. And one cannot help but remember the bus scene in Force Majeure (a film with which Östlund won the Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival), when the driver is taking an extremely sharp curve on a very narrow, since the Swedish director explained in a visit to the Criterion offices that it is based on a real video that is posted on YouTube (and that took place in Spain), and that apparently he takes quite a few references from these videos for some ideas that will later appear in his films.
The difference in And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine with respect to the anecdote converted into a fictional scene is that the authors of the work seek to construct a discourse that narratively does not depend on anything other than what has been, and not to construct from what exists something that does not exist. It is, either as satire or as criticism. Here one discovers the elements one expects to find, but with a feeling of greater difficulty in putting together a speech. In fact, very occasionally a voice-over appears so that the images can flow better and thus we understand where they want us to go. But that objective may already be clear at the beginning, even though the saturation of funny, extreme, shocking or absurd images later makes us doubt what you have to make clear. Basically because the film itself sometimes becomes what it criticizes, but above all because it covers a lot in a short time and with few words, which is both a success and a failure. Axel Danielson and Maximilien van Aertryck are interested in talking about the origin and evolution of image creation, of capitalism that absorbs everything, of the current moment – the use of social networks, the increase of “stories”, “reels”, etc. -, how the images are practically distorting reality, or deconstructing a reality that offers images that do not exist in person. And so with everything.
That’s why it’s easy to find a lot of satisfaction while watching And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine. Because it talks about the “creation” of content, it reflects on what we are contemplating (or consuming), at the same time a representation, at the same time reality. As a film, it talks about information, and how it has evolved into spectacle and entertainment. It also takes the opportunity to dedicate a few minutes to “influencers” and their stupidity (especially in cases that go beyond selling something), and to question whether when we watch a news program on television we expect to obtain information from a reliable source or whether we don’t give a damn. Nor does it forget what is to come, leaving data on video consumption, the number of publications per minute and what we are and do with them, remembering for a moment how little and finite we all are. The moment in which an ape spends several minutes looking at photos of himself on Instagram stands out, demonstrating that it is an addictive thing, while also becoming irrelevant, whether the content that is shown is relevant or not.
However, just as all that is positive, on the negative side is that it is a hodgepodge of many images and ideas that seem to end in nothing. An anecdote. A reflection that may already be so widespread and normalized that it makes no difference. In the end, after so much evolution on the Internet (perhaps the parallel reflection of that of the images in And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine), what its authors are telling us is that living in a permanent showcase has become normalized, and this is something that with a single sentence Arantxa Tirado said just the other day on her Twitter account. But hey, maybe that’s why we also have to appreciate that, despite this and that. The best and the least best of this film: all reflection actually ends in oneself, since most of us consume both images and we produce them, and I have used the words “consume” and “produce” with their more capitalist meaning here. Because there I have also seen myself, in this case from the outside – that is to say – writing and publishing on the Internet or watching videos of what the State of Israel perpetrates in Gaza with genuine distress, rage and heartbreak, and by continuing to do ‹scroll› I have come across funny videos or memes that I have laughed at without 10 minutes having passed between one moment and the next.
I watched and rated And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine ★★★ on Monday Dec 25, 2023.
(Madrid, 1987) Novelist by vocation, SEO specialist by profession. Music lover, cinephile and reading lover, but in “amateur” mode.