The Girl from Monday (2005)

Bill Sage: Jack

Quotes 

• Jack : There was a dictatorship of the consumer now. What most people wanted most of the time, and were willing to pay for, was good. Whatever defied the logic of the market was bad. Automatic world. Disposable income was the chief revolutionary virtue. Everyone had what they wanted, always. As long as they did their part and threw themselves, body and soul, towards the aim of economic supremacy.

• Jack : It was a culture of desire. You had to want in order to be wanted. And you had to be wanted in order to survive.

• Jack : What do you call yourself?

  The Girl From Monday : Nobody.

• Jack : Although everything imaginable was on the web, certain texts had disappeared. Though interactivity and equal access to information were the cornerstone of the revolution's rhetoric, no one seemed to notice, or at least feel, the loss of expression officially deemed malcontent, antisocial, and sinful. I knew. I was the architect of the agency's demographics and target marketing programs. The people were our targets, and we listened to their language, we monitored their dreams, we took note of every choice they made in cyberspace, we studied their buying motives and propensities, then created messages that perfectly reflected their existing emotional states. No one could hide. Triple M could recognize any citizen as soon as they turned on their computer. The web would dynamically reconfigure itself to suite an individual. Something you could hold in your hand, read on your own, think about in private - this was considered elitist, immoral, and bad for business.

• [first lines] 

  Jack : It's such a long way down, it's strange. The word becomes - flesh? The body remains... what? She had traveled light years to get here. And in the vaporous fields of her home star no one had bodies, or names, or identity. A living thought or feeling, stretching out in all directions. Not measured but desired, elegant. But here, in the flesh, the revolution had come.

• Jack : Acts of love, charity, and eroticism for their own sake were soon seen as perverse self-indulgences. Inhumane, uncivilized, barbaric.

• Cecile : The feeling is the whole approach could be more, well, sexy. Much more provocative.

  Jack : The children's wear account...

  Abercrombie : Kids and not just children Jack, they're consumers.

• Jack : Because of the high incidence of handgun-related violence in school, only convicts were assigned teaching positions.

• Jack : It's how it starts - getting involved, with people, caring about them, mutual dependency - that kind of thing. Love, eventually there's no escape.

• [last lines] 

  Jack : I'll never know if she made it. But I hope... and I try... to resist. Even me, whom no one needs pity, even I can see this... now. What humans do - trying.