Not sure if this is a proper post to this community, but I've been trying to be more active so figured I'd give it a shot. Mostly just want to get this off my chest really.

I've had a similar feeling with The Boys, also on Amazon Prime, where for the most part you're just watching something that's fun, dark, and light hearted, but seems to be intentionally peppered with anti-capitalist rhetoric, but like, in a safe way. The platform being owned by the richest most capitalist dickhead on Earth probably has something to do with it, but really that's just how capital works: it co-opts the social and cultural anxieties of the era into a form that can be packaged and sold, and so on and on it goes.

But there's one line in the show that I can't help but feel does have something sinister behind it, and it's Moldaver's line: "I'm not a communist, Mr. Howard. That's just a dirty word they use to describe people who aren't insane."

Without going into her character too much, she seems to be a scientist that's more focused on finishing her research on cold fusion than aligning herself with any sort of political ideology, so she's using the communists as a means to an end. But the fact that she's aligning herself with the communists, giving speeches to communists, understands that capitalism is undermining her research and is leading to a worse world, then why wouldn't she just be explicitly communist, unless the showrunners are trying to imply something very specific about communism, or at least, a sentiment towards communism?

Now I may be reading way, way too much into this, but there's something nagging at the back of my head about this kind of wording, that these kinds of sentiments represented in liberal media are used in a way to actually reinforce negative stereotypes about communism by acknowledging that while right wingers do misuse that word to mean essentially 'anything they don't like', that you still shouldn't be asking too many questions about communism itself because that's irrelevant. In essence, you don't have to be an "extremist" to poke fun at conservatives, implying in a weird round-a-bout way that communism itself is too extreme for most people, and isn't exactly a position a true intellectual should take.

I remember feeling something similar during The Last of Us when Joel brother denies he's a communist but his wife says something to the effect, "No, we literally are, this is a commune, we're communists." It's played for laughs and it's harmless enough, but it still seems to be one of those weird lines that seemingly puts a positive spin on communism, but ultimately reinforces the idea that it's an outlandish concept that doesn't really deserve further scrutiny, or at the very least, seems to be content on keeping the term vague enough so that you can reasonably argue that the showrunners could fall on either side of some argument of whether or not 'communism is acceptable'.

I understand that communism is a bit complicated of a subject to thoroughly explore in a show meant for mass appeal, but I can't help but feel that these shows are intentionally messing with the cultural anxiety of aligning yourself with communism, and maybe intentionally, maybe not, reinforcing the idea that people shouldn't align themselves with communism through some sort of meta-narrative hidden wink.

That's all. thx.

  • ChaosMaterialist [he/him]
    ·
    6 months ago

    Now I may be reading way, way too much into this

    Not really, but Fallout's own lore/satire make it complicated.

    I remember feeling something similar during The Last of Us when Joel brother denies he's a communist but his wife says something to the effect, "No, we literally are, this is a commune, we're communists." It's played for laughs and it's harmless enough, but it still seems to be one of those weird lines that seemingly puts a positive spin on communism

    The Fallout games, under their post-apocalyptic setting, is a satire of a hyper-1950s American society projected into the retro-future. This includes a divergent timeline where a McCarthyist cold war against "Communist" China. The games also came out long before all the anti-china nonsense of today. This residual anti-communism exists in the post-war period like the other aesthetic features in the bombed-out cities and cultures. In the playable sections of the games, (1, 2, NV) not much is made of this among wastelanders, as most are worried about the day-to-day survival and rebuilding, which itself is a juxtaposition against the ideologies the pre-war society thought so important. Much of the games spend time poking fun at this.

    Probably the most liberal take is the opening line from the first game: "War. War never changes." This implies a kind of eternality of the human condition from which we cannot escape, and the games do lean into this worldview intentionally or not.

    these kinds of sentiments represented in liberal media are used in a way to actually reinforce negative stereotypes about communism by acknowledging that while right wingers do misuse that word to mean essentially 'anything they don't like', that you still shouldn't be asking too many questions about communism itself because that's irrelevant. In essence, you don't have to be an "extremist" to poke fun at conservatives, implying in a weird round-a-bout way that communism itself is too extreme for most people, and isn't exactly a position a true intellectual should take.

    This is also correct, as mass-media is filtered through capitalism and thus must contort itself to either fit in or at least fly over the head of the censors. It's hard to draw whether the character has this worldview because of the Fallout lore or our world is seeping in. Likewise, as pieces of fiction, both the games and the show are written by people situated within a capitalist society, so its hard to draw conclusions about the characters and situation that isn't as contrived as the narrative itself. It's complicated.