Since the end of the 20th century, there has been a rapid change regarding the criteria for the ascription of authenticity. In many media formats, fiction frames and reality frames get blended. Documentaries resemble fiction films and, conversely, fiction films appear to be documentaries. The success of the film “Blair Witch Project” anticipates this development. In the same year, the show “Big Brother” initiates reality TV in Netherlands. Countless formats follow whose success is based primarily on the assumption that they show real emotions and not enacted ones, as even method acting has become identifiable as acting, that it is not convincingly authentic anymore. Once the acting of everyday life people has been unmasked as acting either, however, this propels the development of new ascription criteria. At first, a person might appear authentic when violating conventionalized norms. Then, someone might be considered authentic when following these norms, as this may seem to be a genuine expression of this person’s personal inclinations. The change of criteria for the ascription of authenticity may help to understand how a former actor became the president of the United States in 1981 and a reality TV star in 2017. The latter type would be exemplified by something like Charlie Band’s The Creeps(sorry to keep giving short actor examples, they’re just obvious ones that I know about). Phil Fondacaro is never, let’s face it, going to play Dracula. So what does he get to play in The Creeps? A very short Dracula. By the same token Mat Fraser, that bloke off that telly show who has those weird little arms, is clearly never going to play an action hero.

terms set in italics indicate that they are employed as a catachresis for a word of another language or speech community. Dichotomizations like the one referred to here as the defining criterion of populism are no strangers to politics as suggested by Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political. Unlike economics with its leading difference of profitable and non-profitable and aesthetics with the difference of beautiful and ugly, to Schmitt (1963) political action is governed by the difference of friend and enemy. Likewise, the theme of emotions and politics accompanies the occidental history since the Sophists as a practical concern and has first been developed to a morally restrained psychagogy by Aristotle (1995).

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Enter stage left, ‘ Kung Fu Flid‘ (aka ‘Unarmed But Dangerous’), a film whose tag line goes –“They shot his wife, they kidnapped his daughter. They messed with the wrong Flid.” Standing out from the crowd indeed!

I stood next to Mat Fraser at a bar once. I’m pretty sure it was him. He’s quite distinctive, with the little arms and everything. There are of course other people in the world who were born with similar Thalidomide-induced disabilities but he’s the only one I know who acts, and this was the bar at Nottingham Playhouse. Other means obtained from popular culture that enable Trump to counteract the culture of political correctness and thus provoke sympathy among his followers are his designation of Joe Biden as “Sleepy Joe Biden” (e.g., April 13, August 12, September 2) of Nancy Pelosi as “Crazy Nancy” (August 2, 3, 11) and of the mainstream media as “lamestream media” (June 18, July 29). Discourse analytical considerations also provided guidance to conduct the analyses of communication sequences. Unlike some adherents of conversation analysis seem to suggest (see Flader and Trotha, 1988), sequences of communication do not emerge from the data. Their discovery rather depends on preconceptions. Without the knowledge of the workings of discourses of political correctness, e.g., some of Trump’s utterances could not adequately be set in relation with neither comments and publications of news media nor their communicative environments in general.

Footnotes

In the course of the preparations for a broader study on populist communication, data have been collected of publicly available political communication. The data comprise communication offers of governmental officials, news media publications, influential social media content, and public protest messages. The process of organizing and preliminarily examining the data in view of the theoretical preconceptions outlined above led to the tentative formulation of the following hypotheses: 1) News media as well as the dynamics of political communication based on the difference of friend and enemy help legitimizing populist claims and directing public attention toward them while feeding into a narrative of a diffuse category of threats that creates objects of angst and thereby enhances social cohesion. 2) With resources derived from popular culture such as reality TV, commodities, and pop songs, populists exploit the culture of political correctness, which is facilitated through the ascription of authenticity 4 (preliminarily understood in the everyday language sense as the interpretation of action as not governed by social norms or expectations but by the actor’s genuine inclinations and convictions). Phil Hobden: ‘Kung Fu Flid’ is very much a unique action film. What initially attracted you to the project? Following Montesquieu, Simmel (1908) underscores that fear holds together states, i.e., enhances social cohesion. Although Simmel uses the German term “fürchten,” he does not refer to a tangible, present object the emotion is directed to but rather to a diffuse threat. In German, the latter is considered an antecedent of “Angst” rather than “Furcht” which is related to a concrete threat. rounded up to 7 - Definitely not for everyone, but I had fun with the film. Fans of weird and wonderful movies should see this if only for the utterly bizarre scene with the Jesus freak taxi driver-what the hell was that all about?

TS: The whole film in pre-production and when we were filming was funny and I did think to myself all the way through the process "I can't believe that we are creating a film as off the wall as this!" It was the launch event for something or other. I was working for the Regional Arts Board at the time and we had maybe put some money in. There was free wine so, naturally, I went along. I’m fairly positive that must have been Mat Fraser. Kung Fu Flid is not overly long at 90 minutes but never quite works. Very simply, it falls between two stools, unsure whether to be exploitational or grittily real. Writer-director Xavier Leret had an opportunity to make a quite unique film with something to say about disability, about society’s attitudes, about the media’s portrayal, about assumptions. Or he could have made a statement by not making a statement, by making a film in which a person with a very obvious and quite extreme disability plays an ordinary character, a role where the disability is irrelevant. But those are simply another two stools between which Kung Fu Flid resolutely falls. The first thing that hits you is the title. Either the best or the worst ever. Possibly both. Once heard, never forgotten. Controversial and bound to upset people who like to get upset. And it tells you exactly what you’re going to see.PH: There have been a spate of low-budget (by Hollywood standards) action or gangster films made in the UK over the past 5 years. What is it about the genre that appeals to UK independent filmmakers?

On March 18, a tweet of Trump’s account announces that he signed the “Defense Production Act” enabling him to use resources from the private sector to combat the virus, underlining that “we are all in this TOGETHER!” Beside emphasizing his alleged achievements regarding telehealth, he introduces the theme of increasing domestic manufacturing, i.e. “Made in the United States,” in response to the virus, and again asserts that Democrats and Republicans are unified by the effort of overcoming the crisis. During a press conference on the same day, Trump places COVID-19 in the proximity of natural disasters for the first time. This is interrupted by a little girl of nine or ten years, Lola (Bethan Leret). The impression I got from this scene was that Lu is Lola’s mum and Jimmy is Lu’s boyfriend, a sort of adoptive father to the girl. It was only later that I realised that Jimmy is actually Lu’s husband and Lola’s dad. That’s just not made clear in that bedroom scene when it’s actually fairly important character establishment. I mean, all they had to do was have Lola call Jimmy ‘Daddy’ and we would all know where we stood. TS: We are the only people, to my knowledge, in the world that have made a film like this and a few people I have talked to have said we have also created a new genre “Flidsplotation”! When this film comes out maybe there will be a few more made which will be brilliant as there are a lot of talented actors out there who have disabilities and they need to be seen and heard.I'm not about to big this film up as anything extraordinary - it's cheap and looks it, and neither the acting or direction is going to win any awards. The Godfather, it most certainly ain't. But despite the technical shortcomings, I was thoroughly entertained throughout, the film definitely delivering the goods as a trashy piece of exploitation.