Saturday Evening Film: A 2020 Documentary About Prince Mohammed bin Salman

How He Rose To Power, What He Wants, How He Brought A Revolution of Reform To Saudi Arabia, And His Central Role In Geo-Politics

This 2020 documentary, by French film maker Antoine Vitkine, is inevitably dated, undeniably biased, but still a great intro course on the rise of modern Saudi Arabia under Prince Mohammed bin Salman (“MBS.”) It’s very well made, even if it does saucer around on the surface of things, similar to a mainstream glossy newscast, relying on propaganda sub-notes that one feels but can’t quite define.

Most of us, or maybe I should speak for myself, know next to nothing about Saudi Arabia, but now suddenly it’s the seat of the very pole-vault into the Jetsons, the “future,” the rise of the post-city future “city,” where humans, those who survive, will be mere afterthoughts, and “data mining” will somehow power the whole monstrosity, filled with humanoid robots, gravity defying urban planning, and a sublimated, amputated version of “nature,” in whose name they pretend all of this is happening.

Previous post about NEOM, “…city of the future on the Red Sea,” here.

“Where growth and investment are unleashed…”

We understood nothing, I didn’t anyway, of what was really unfolding in plain sight.

Maybe you will say I should be happy, grateful, hopeful about the “future,” but I feel anxious.

Tell me what you think.

Just days ago I found humor in President Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia, at least the part where they played “YMCA” at the end of his talk. I thought it was all some kind of relaxation of global tensions, and maybe the beginning of the end of Gaza’s brutal torment.

Instead it was the ushering in of the real “New World Order,” where the universal “one language,” “one people,” and “one religion,” was in fact the language of “…unleashed growth and investment.” Money that isn’t even money anymore, it’s something else, something new, alien, and forbidding. No more ideologies, wars, politics, or even woke-ism. These technocratic-autocrats simply need a world scaled to their “investments,” which must be given whatever oxygen they may require.

That’s the language. All differences dissolve, all history, in the presence of this kind of “money,” bubbling up from the ground in the form of “black gold.”

The documentary doesn’t seek to explain who he is, MSB, but seems to make clear, without addressing it, that he is the de facto leader of the New World Order. Some, in comments, say he is the AC, but that’s impossible to speculate about.

Certainly, he is charming, and appears in some unsettling way to remain calm at all times, and to be ideologically blank, which might have seemed a good thing, but suddenly isn’t.

Is worship of money the actual One World Religion?

All I know about Vitkine, the film maker, is that he is anti Putin, and anti-Trump—jaundiced about MSB, but possibly for the wrong reasons.

One appreciates his reforms, his concessions to feminism, his rejection of “the Islamists—” but to what end?

Here’s the documentary:

One point made in comments, perhaps minor:

“The info in this video is very, VERY outdated. We have a metro and bus service in Riyadh and we also have a sewage system.”

—YouTube comment

Well, that’s good.

Saudi Arabia also has no income taxes, and citizens don’t pay for utilities.

MSB brought rap and pop music to Saudi Arabia, outlawed the religious police, and imprisoned over 100 clerics, warning them that he would tolerate no dissent from them.

Steep learning curve.

Let’s keep learning.

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