What is Supply Chain Cinema?

Somehow culture and commerce intersect. Read a book, watch a movie, wander in an art gallery, and it can change the way you think. Maybe just a little bit, maybe a lot; maybe immediately, and maybe not for some time. Or not at all. Why? Why does it happen when it happens, and why not went it doesn't.

How does it work? How does a story or movie or painting move from words or images into my head or yours, and become tied up into the webs of meaning already filling the place.

I assume that, if a book or film leaves a memory, necessarily it has rewired my brain just a bit.

For me, now, and for some of you readers, the words "Blue Velvet" conjure up an image of Dennis Hopper and the name of David Lynch, but before I wandered into the theater one Saturday afternoon about twenty years ago the words "blue velvet" would have conjured up a mental picture of fabric. Somehow Lynch and Hopper and Isabella Rossilini and Kyle MacLachlan successfully rewired my brain.

What difference does it make? After all, it isn't as if readers/filmgoers/patrons of the arts are simple robots, downloading a program of action dictated by the artist. Some people emerged from the theater after watching "Hotel Rwanda" thinking that Paul Rusesabagina was a brave man and an inspiration, others may have become more sensitized to other historical, recent or ongoing tragedies in post-colonial Africa, while others walked out thinking 'wow, crazy people killing each other for nothing.'

By the way, this is Supply Chain Cinema. You see my examples are movies and so while I've pointed to movies and books and fine arts, I'm most interested in movies. I don't read too fast and can't wax too poetic on a painting. Not my strong points. For the most part I will talk about film and ignore the rest.

I like to watch.

And because I'm a somewhat geeky, economics and policy type -- interested in how people understand the world, what helps and what hurts that understanding of the world, and how that understanding translates into helping and hurting other people -- after I watch I wonder. What does it mean. How will I be different? How will others change?

Of course one related question gets lots of attention: culture and violence. Does watching violent movies make the watchers more violent? (Or less?) If I go see "Atlas Shrugged" when it comes out in 2008, will it make me more libertarian? So the question is, "Does Gordon Gekko matter?"

The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.

A lot of people seemed to make a big deal of the movie "Wall Street," often quoting or misquoting Gordon Gekko's lines. Why?

What difference does it make?

That's what I want to know. That is why I am blogging here at "Supply Chain Cinema."