Kingsman
is an environmental reactionary’s wet fever dream
So I saw Kingsman last night with a friend of mine. Up front I’ll have to say that I wouldn’t have gone to see it at the cinema if I hadn’t been lured there by a free ticket. I’d describe it as B.D.F. (Big Dumb Fun) which is no bad thing, and at least the people making the film knew what they were making and really went for it. Having said that, they also did something else that may or may not have been intentional, is big, certainly isn’t dumb and also wasn’t entirely fun.
*****SPOILER ALERT: I am about to totally ruin this movie for you if you haven’t already seen it*****
The context for the plot of Kingsman is as follows:
The earth’s climate has been unstable recently. A great deal of research and publicity has gone into constructing the thesis (and public acceptance of same) that this is due to human activity, specifically the release of CO2 into the atmosphere by industrial civilisation.
This, on its own, is not particularly strong or shocking stuff, but to understand what the film is really saying, we need to look a little deeper into this shift of humanity’s self-image, from the pinnacle of Creation as envisaged by the religions of the book to what Bill Hicks referred to as ‘a virus with shoes’.
A consonance between right-wingers and conspiracy theorists has led to a fairly unified narrative emerging from both camps: a ‘global elite’ have manufactured the climate change threat and are using it as an excuse to implement ‘solutions’ which will crash industrial civilisation, reduce human population, herd the remnants of mankind into cities and re-wild the remainder of the planet.
This however is where the right-winger and the conspiracy theorist tend to part ways, or at least most regularly diverge.
For the right-winger, this is all evidence of a liberal, earth-worshiping communist conspiracy to destroy capitalism and free markets, hobble entrepreneurship, seize private goods and property and turn everyone into sackcloth-draped wards of the State.
For the conspiracy theorist, this ‘endgame’ will be a global socialist authoritarian regime in which private property will be outlawed, cash will be a distant memory and all citizens will be vaccinated, micro-chipped and tracked from birth to death as they work endlessly to pay a predatory corporatocracy for every basic necessity of life under the watchful threatening eye of a surveillance state functioning only to safeguard the extraction of profit from the workers by a cosseted rentier class.
For the right-winger, the protagonists are the self-interested businessmen of the world and the chief enemies in this battle for the planet are environmentalists, liberals and scientists. For conspiracy theorists, the protagonist is the average citizen being written off by an indifferent and selfish elite; the enemies are bankers, technologists, technocrats, government officials and big business (and also some environmentalists, liberals and scientists).
Dig a little deeper into all this and you’ll find that the prevailing assumption in conspiracy circles is that the ‘elite’ is comprised of Freemasons and other secret societies, structured in the manner of matryoshka dolls, one inside the other. These secret societies work in opposition to the interests of the people and in their own interests, which are broadly aligned with the elite establishments populated by their own members, such as big business, politics, technology, finance and so on.
One of the origins of this web of secret societies, according to many conspiracists, is the Knights Templar, a group of knights who became stupendously wealthy during the time of the Crusades by providing security services to pilgrims to the Holy Land, and who invented the modern concept of deposit banking by allowing travelers to make deposits with the Templars in London, say, and withdraw equivalent funds from the Templars in Jerusalem, thereby dispensing with the dangerous necessity of carrying large amounts of gold through unstable areas. The Templars were eradicated by the Pope in the early 1300s because, depending on who you believe, either he was afraid that their wealth and influence over the royal houses of Europe might eventually challenge his supremacy or he thought they were worshipers of Baphomet, a demonic entity represented in their rituals by a hairy severed head rumoured to be that of John the Baptist who they may or may not have believed was the true Christ, and in whose favour they repudiated Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Guess which motive I find more plausible.
Now let’s take a look at Kingsman.
A secret service, with no political allegiance or public accountability, possessing extreme wealth based on holdings dating back to an earlier feudal period, exists and operates in its own interests. The Kingsman service works through an old-money establishment front, a tailor shop on Savile Row, itself a perfect representation of the way secret societies cloak themselves in order to fit into the culture they nest inside of, and a linked country estate. It has influence over government, as shown when Hart gets Eggsy released from police custody in the amount of time it takes his interrogating officer to smoke a cigarette, but no allegiance to government, or anyone else for that matter. It is also an areligious organisation, and given the sneering response of Hart and Chester to Mark Hamill’s scientist-character’s originating of the Gaia theory, not too concerned about ecological issues either. The Kingsmen are the Knights Templar, and by extension, the shadow web of secret societies that operate behind the scenes, ensuring global stability and security for their own interests and in service to their vision of what the world should be like.
The film begins with the abduction of Mark Hamill’s scientist, a thinly veiled reference to James Lovelock — he of the Gaia Hypothesis, i.e. Earth as a self-regulating organism. Kingsman sends an agent to rescue him but the agent is killed by the bad guy’s girlfriend who has knives for legs. Valentine, the irregularly lisping villain played with glee by the ever-fantastic Samuel L. Jackson, appears on the scene and tells the scientist that he just wants to talk to him.
As the story unfolds, we find out that Valentine is world famous as a successful technologist, internet entrepreneur and environmental activist. His new project is a free SIM card that will give everyone free calls and internet everywhere forever. In his downtime he is also quietly meeting in private with the leaders of the world (political and financial) to retail his big fix for the world’s environmental crisis. We don’t find out much about his plan until later in the film, and this creates a very interesting dynamic, which is that for the first two-thirds of the film we find ourselves following the story of an unaccountable organisation that kills with impunity according to its own preferences as it fights to stop a well-meaning environmentalist who wants to give people access to free communications. Quite an inversion on the usual ‘property developer threatens family until Jackie Chan saves them’ action movie plot.
In the final act, all becomes clear. Valentine’s plan is to use the ubiquity of his SIM cards, now that everyone has dutifully lined up and gotten themselves one, to broadcast a signal that disrupts the fear and aggression centres of the human brain to the extent that any human thus affected becomes a raging lunatic intent on murdering anyone and anything within reach. During his explanation of the plan, and his motive behind it, the ‘virus’ metaphor for human beings is trotted out.
He has also handily equipped a pre-selected elite with implants that prevent them from being affected (and even given them access to the standard super-villain mountain base for safety). At the appointed time, the signal will be switched on and the masses will turn on each other until the world’s population is reduced to a manageable number, which is to say a number that can be managed by the pre-selected elite who will then presumably govern this new Eden, body-surfing on the bloody remnants of the populace who didn’t get the memo. Not all humans, in Valentine’s world-view, are as viral as others.
Essentially, this is the plan ascribed to everyone from the Bilderberg Group to the United Nations’ Agenda 21 by conspiracists and their bedfellows, except in this case it’s being carried out by a private entrepreneur, but with a twist: most of the world’s heads of state are totally fine with it, apart from a Swedish princess who ends the film by taking one up the jacksy from our boy-done-good hero (if you haven’t seen the movie, that’s not a crude joke — she literally tells him that they can “do it in the asshole” if he saves the world, and the last shot of the film is her rolling onto her stomach and presenting her bare cheeks for the aforementioned invasive procedure.
So the conspiracy is the governments of the world, or at least the leaders thereof, businessmen and other wealthy elitists, the technological sector and the environmental intelligentsia (yeah, the professor from the first scene is totally down with everyone on earth involuntarily killing one another to save the planet) against the poor old workers of Spaceship Earth who have only the Knights Templar, sorry, the Kingsmen to defend them.
Therefore, in this film, the subtext is clear: the unaccountable shadow operatives of the world’s secret societies are working for your benefit, Little Man, to save you from the manipulations of the evil technologists trying to give you free communications, the spineless politicians who will say yes to any plan that keeps them alive and solves their problems without them having to actually do anything and of course, the pesky academics who apparently have no compassion for the common people and will turn into genocidal-maniacs-by-proxy at the mere suggestion of a solution to the intellectual problems their careers are dedicated to the elucidation of.
The film ends with everyone’s head exploding (again, not joking) and the world goes back to still having all the problems it had before, but those dicks that wanted to solve those problems the wrong way (i.e. not the Kingsman way) are all decapitated worm food.
Message: Anyone trying to solve the environmental crises of our age is secretly plotting to kill off most of the world’s population in service of their own elite agenda. Thank God someone in a bespoke suit was there to kill them with their girlfriend’s leg (also not joking).
Never fear, the Kingsmen are here, i.e. the secret societies that operate in the shadows to solve all those problems we want solved but can’t seem to take care of through consensus and transparent institutions. They will guard us from those killer environmentalists, and all they ask for in return is a carte blanche for murder, an unlimited supply of money and the right to have anal sex with princesses. Sounds like a pretty good deal for us, right?
This film, for all its light-hearted capering, is a very expensive defense of the status quo and a deeply insidious character assassination of the various movements attempting to stem the wave of greed, consumerism and socio-political myopia that threatens to drown us all.
And that’s the movie you didn’t see.
