So tonight I watched Syriana, and I have to say that I am tremendously impressed. Its plot is very hard to follow, and I must admit that I still don't grasp all the details. The film interweaves several storylines, jumping across national boundaries and diving into legal, financial, and cultural vagaries that are at times nearly incomprehensible to laity. But that measure of uncertainty, frustrating as it is, is perhaps the best way of representing the unrepresentability of total relations (yup, I'm borrowing from The Geopolitical Aesthetic here).

Syriana, as the NYTimes reported earlier this week, was released by Participant Productions, a two-year-old outfit which released Good Night, and Good Luck and North Country earlier this year. The interesting thing about Participant is that it is committed to the advancement of a left-leaning political agenda. Its website explains that the company's goal "is to deliver compelling entertainment that will inspire audiences to get involved in the issues that affect us all." Some skeptics might charge that this is a clever ruse to pander to leftist audiences (I get the sense that this is the case with the people marketing the Narnia movie to Christian movie-goers), but coming out of the theater I really felt that the political motives in Syriana are sincere.

Now, the agenda of the people at Participant may not be as radical as we would like, and I may be naively liberal to believe, along with their mission, in "the power of media to create great social change," but the conviction behind their message is something we should support. That kind of conviction, rampant on the right and lacking on the left, is the prerequisite for positive social change.