I don't even mean a bad thing, necessarily. I mean a thing that is made to normalize the status quo, pave over inherent contradictions in late stage neoliberal capitalism, make even the idea of changing society somewhat seem evil or impossible, and have lots of performative gestures that hide the stench of affluent arrogance. :zizek-preference:
I know it came out well before 2020, but I finally got around to seeing Iron Man 2 and I stopped at the instant Tony Stark said "I've successfully privatized world peace." It was bad. Very bad. The original movie was entertaining even if it had some painful deliberate adjustments to the comic book character to make him more like :my-hero: but the sequel played out like Ayn Rand fanfiction, especially the big smart awesome genius giving a speech about how the evil government and the ungrateful moochers were taking the sweat from his brow and so on and so on. :zizek:
The flood of MCU movies wore me out to the point that I stopped watching them and because of that I have only seen maybe half of them by now. Maybe it was a mistake returning to try watching Iron Man 2 because I now have even less interest in seeing anything MCU ever again. :zizek-fuck:
Mike Judge's Idiocracy. First off, there's all the obviois eugenics shit, which we've talked about, but also, as seen on Sarah Z's recent video essay, there's clear corruption shown through things like a corporation literally buying the entire FDA, but the movie implies that it's only a problem because there's dum-dums at the wheel. Not to mention that its whole ethos is Bush-era liberal smugness, so the claims of it being a documentary are pretty wrong.
I like the take about that world being better than ours because the president hires the smartest science advisor he can find and just does what he says.
We couldn't imagine the president doing anything like that in our world you know?
I remember that years ago, Cracked, back when Cracked was actually half-decent, argued that Idiocracy is actually a utopia for that exact reason. Also, the idiots are more benign stupid, they just think that Gatorade is nourishment, not racist or anything like that.
Is that where I got it from? Cracked fell off
I don't know, but it is probably a common observation for those who care about science. Like, climate scientists watching that probably thought "I WISH this was our world!"
Yes thanks, so many of my friends hyped that movie up and ignored all the bullshit it does.