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:
perhaps an obvious one but im gonna say black panther, not just for killmonger being based and them having to make him kill his girlfriend for no reason to make him look like the bad guy, but for its portrayal of the international rules-based order
borrowing from an old comment, the thing that i found most interesting about that movie is that killmonger completely plays by all the countrys rules to come into power - he comes from the appropriate royal bloodline, he gets the backing of one of the major feudal lords, he comes in openly and challenges the sitting monarch who accepts the challenge without coercion (and as we saw earlier in the movie, challenge to personal combat is a normal and accepted means of transfer of power), and then he wins decisively and kills the sitting monarch (as far as anyone knows). all of this is ludicrous crusader kings shit and an absurd way to run an enlightened modern country, but he plays by the rules.
and the very second that somebody they dont like gets into power, what is the rules-based "liberal" response? pro-royalist military coup, openly backed by literally the cia. they only find out the black panther guy is alive later, so they still think hes dead when they throw it all into motion but that doesnt stop them. and the movie is written in a way that makes this seem like the obviously logical and honourable and correct thing to do, and that these are the good guys that you should support. and at the end stability is restored, and even though hes a hereditary monarch without even the figleaf of parliamentary oversight, hes pro-western and he says nice things in speeches so thats basically the same as democracy right?
like even in the most woke lib "pro-black" blockbuster movie, cia-backed coup is just seen as the obvious response to any thorny political questions.
but hey, they did open one (1) community centre at the end so the injustice faced by black people worldwide was pretty much solved :liberalism:
he comes from the appropriate royal bloodline, he gets the backing of one of the major feudal lords, he comes in openly and challenges the sitting monarch who accepts the challenge without coercion
it's also not talked about much but Black Panther as a depiction of African life is comparable to the film coming to America.
I was pretty liberal when it came out and even then found it kinda gross that in this allegedly super advanced utopian African country, the monarch (with absolute arbitrary ruling power) is determined by who is best at stick fighting. Like u can imagine them having laser guns and robot suits but their political structures still have to be a racist caricature of "tribal" societies.
Ironically, I can imagine that sort of bullshit being far more likely under UK laws, with the bad guy couping the Queen and then using the old non-UK feudal holdings like the Duke of Normandy or some shit to end-run the UK government
Black Panther is not anti Trump. It's pro Trump. It's literally propaganda that people didn't even know they were eating up. The country is ethnically homogenous - the only people in Wakanda are Wakandans. There are a few different cults, and a few different dialects, but they all speak the same language. If you forget that Wakanda is supposed to be in East Africa, it starts to sound an awful lot like a Trumpian fantasy land. Here is an example, albeit fictional, where a walled-in nation is thriving, self-reliant, and completely unaccommodating of outsiders. Simply replace the geographic location, the race, and the language, and it really looks like the United States that President Trump fantasized about - if only coal had the power and value of Vibranium.
- Strict immigration
- Strong nationalism
- Border wall
- Traditionalist
- Pro-military
V for Vendetta.
A government uses a false flag pandemic to consolidate power through provision of a vaccine. A single person in a Guy Fawkes mask wins the populace over with atrociously verbose wordplay and domestic terrorism. He also wins the girl over to his ideology by kidnapping and torturing her.
It’s less lib and more outright reactionary, but whatever.
The writer of V for Vendetta Alan Moore is literally a communist space wizard which makes this quite a funny one. The point of that story is really supposed to be a superhero doing revolution against British fascism. Of course the whole 1 person thing is a problem but that's always going to be a problem doing a superhero style graphic novel, but the overall premise beyond that is just revolution and not moralising about it.
Moore disowned the movie, saying it was Liberal performative whining about 2000s-era Neo-cons
The graphic novel presents V as way more ambiguous morally
Yeah, also even if V is still the instigator in the novel, a lot of the chaos and unraveling of the fascist state is because of the different parts of it manouvering against each other and trying to seize power, V is only tangentially involved in killing the head of state, he's just assassinated by a relatively random woman who has been victimized by the system.
Also the aftermath is shown as having very harsh effects on people even if its good that the fascist state has collapsed, one of the last things we see is a woman being forced into selling herself for food cause all of hers was stolen, which might be intended as a kind of karmic thing cause the woman was one of the main political schemers in the fascist state but its still fucked up and something that would happen if the state collapses with no real structure or organization to follow it. Contrast that to the movie which just kinda ends in a peaceful demonstration and the fascist soldiers refusing to gun down a crowd.
also why do people think guy fawkes was a freedom fighter that's just not true
i think people mostly arent aware of the whole catholic monarchist chud aspect
and its just easy for people to empathise with a dude who wants to blow up the british parliament, its relatable yknow
It's not that he was a freedom fighter. It's that a conspiracy of like eight guys almost overthrew a poweful nation. It's a demonstration that even the most towering and monolithic entities are still vulnerable, and that highly motivated individuals can in fact change the world.
Obligatory: I would sell my own mother into slavery to see the movie V for Vendetta 2 :zizek:
Every reboot, remake and revival is part of a class project to 'fix' the cultural cannon into a liberal harmonious framework.
Case in point: the guy remaking cowboy bebop insisting that the original show wasn't a dystopia.
cowboy bebop isn't a show about miserable conditions of bounty hunters chasing criminals because of a crumbling, diseased society spread across the solar system in a haphazard way
it's a show about cool people doing kung fu and witty banter
Case in point: the guy remaking cowboy bebop insisting that the original show wasn’t a dystopia.
:obama-spike: Uhhh let me be less clear
Here's a classic: Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927). It's absolutely a beautiful movie with highly expressive scenes of workers being mistreated, but the message, written on screen after the final scene, is that workers and capitalists have to work together to better their conditions. It hardly makes sense in the context of the movie and Lang himself later recognized that it was essentially just a fairytale. Goebbels liked Metropolis, though, and Lang's co-writer later joined the Nazi party, so that's also an obvious hint to its ideology.
I really, really like that movie, both as a foundational work for cinematic science fiction and as an artistic masterpiece in its own right.
That said, yes, the message is horribly :LIB: especially considering what it showed the workers suffering before that ending.
Even if Lang was kind of a fucked up person, its really funny that in his police mystery movie "M" he based a character on Goebbels and made him the head of a criminal organization that tries to take the law into its own hands mostly due to financial reasons, as the police hunts for a serial killer is hurting criminal organizations, and who tries to make moral judgements despite having killed multiple people himself and ordering torture of innocents in the course of the movie.
Goebbels of course loved it despite obviously being cast as a horrific and evil person who is only seen as a lesser evil by virtue of the main focus of the movie being a serial killer of children, and ended up using scenes from the movie in antisemitic propaganda because the actor who played the serial killer was jewish.
M actually is a movie that I think holds up basically perfectly still today, compared to Metropolis which has cool imagery but kind of a butchered and incoherent story(partially the fault of scenes being literally lost).
I havent seen it since college, but I remember M being really good.
It has a really unique atmosphere due to it being in that early period of sound films, so it doesnt have a real soundtrack outside of music and sound inside of the scene.
Also while its not exactly anti-cop, most of the measures the cops put in to try and catch the serial killer is entirely arbitrary "grrr more cops everywhere! go bother everyone thats a criminal!" shit that doesnt accomplish anything besides make everyone miserable. And the actual investigation they do to find him feels pretty grounded and realistic compared to a lot of police procedurals that try to make it exciting and dynamic, and I at least appreciate that a lot as someone whos guilty pleasure is true crime and police procedural stuff.
M does also show the criminal orgs (aka Ringvereine) as good. They have moral codes etc. and are displayed as distinguishing between civilians and criminals on one hand and between good (securing children) and bad (non sanctioned violence).
It made crime look cool to a good part.
Definitely not the most, but worth mentioning is Zootopia, the movie where a right-wing coup is stopped by the police and the protagonist overcomes systemic racism by being so good at her job that the racists just have to respect her.
yeah but if that movie didn't exist, we wouldn't have that batshit insane abortion-jfk murder fanfic
"Communists, environmentalists, anarchists and anti-colonial revolutionaries are all bad faith actors only pretending to have an ethos to whip up support among the masses. Also anti-colonial struggle is literally fascism."
Man I just wanted more magical martial arts fights.
If you ignore all the bad politics Kora is fun, but with the writers of Disco Elysium it could've been grand. Still one of the few shows in which girls had cool actors with agency to identify with.
About the only thing semi good in Kora with current politics is that she needs help and collectives are stronger than individuals.
Lol yeah. Two of the heroes are cops, one is a girlboss CEO, the other is a war profiteering capitalist who incited a civil war so he could sell arms.
Meanwhile, the villains are all people who "meant well but were too extreme". Like apparently wanting equality for people without magic can only manifest as Amon, who wants to take away everyone's magic, and is actually magic himself. Caring for the environment can only manifest as Unalaq, who actually doesn't care about the environment and wants to destroy the world. There are no alternatives - support the oppressive status quo or be a villain.
The portrayal of anarchism actually baffles me in Korra, because they pretty much had it correct with the air nomads. In ATLA, the air nomads were peaceful, freedom loving people with very little hierarchy and no bigotry. But in Korra, anarchism is when there's no rules and no bedtimes and everything is chaos and it's completely individualistic. Like, Zaheer kill the earth queen and literally tear down the walls separating the rich and the poor - and then they go off to commit genocide against the airbenders for some reason? That is a completely incoherent ideology, yet the show treats it as the only outcome of anarchism.
Also Kuvira is an actual fascist who puts people in concentration camps, but she's the one villain who gets mercy. You want to dismantle unjust hierarchies and remove barriers between nations? We are going to fucking murder you. You want to ethnically cleanse your nation? No biggie, house arrest with your family. The last straw for the good guys is when Kuvira tries to retake land that was colonised for fucks sake
I love ATLA but it did have traces of the same cringe liberalism with how they treated the characters violently resisting a genocidal empire.
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.
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.
right? And the main conclusion he drew is if liberals had too much power then the cops wouldn't be able to effectively fight white nationalists both external and within their own ranks. It's such a bonkers conclusion to both admit cops are full of racist scum, but also they need to be funded and able to shoot who they want, because otherwise they get taken over by racists. The show might as well have been subtitled "there should be more black cops."
I don't fully agree with your take on that being the message of the show...but I would like to add:
Lindelof should get the wall if for no other reason then because of the hooded justice retcon and the entire thematic inversion the show does. Alan Moore's entire thesis is that the genesis of the modern American Superhero is in Birth of a nation: IE a bunch of costumed vigilantes with ridiculous titles like "cyclops" running around the streets dispensing anonymous violence in the service of "law and order". Hooded Justice and his entire costume design is a *direct * nod to this. If I remember right there are even newspaper clippings in the comic that praise the kkk as some of the first vigilantes.
In Lindelof's head I think he's trying to plant the seeds of redemption and to address this critique by making the first superhero a black man...except that isn't actually engaging with and addressing the original critique Watchman presented: its dodging it and moving the goal posts.
The best adaptation watchman has ever had is The Boys season 2.
I don't think your two takes contradict. The entire show is copaganda that proposes the problem with cops are a few bad actors and the system can be redeemed, but only redeemed in specific ways. But because Lindelof is a liberal, he's framing it in liberal terms. "Liberal" in very west wing terms. Like how the cops have their guns locked is liberal to him, but the masked vigilantes doing extrajudicial enhanced interrogation is probably something right wing in his brain.
He's avoiding the structural criticisms of American society Watchmen entirely, you're right. It should have been really obvious when Captain Metropolis had his map of problems in America and listed among them were black unrest and anti-war movements.
I liked that episode where they show Chris Dorner's backstory though :dorner:
“what if the left had too much power? that would also be bad"
I struggle to see how that's the message. If that society is bad, it's because the forces of reaction weren't properly guillotined, not that a liberal was in office no?
I've watched it twice and I never once thought that was a message of the show.
I did see a lot of the show as a liberal self-criticism. If you grill some liberals enough, ask them the main problems with their ideology, they'll eventually bend to saying like they're too harsh on gun ownership, or they don't support the military hard enough, or they're not hard enough on racism. I think liberals know they're far too forgiving of reactionaries and know if they had unanimous power, that reaction would still fester and eventually consume them. The show is pretty honest in that regard, but it makes the wrong conclusion of asserting liberal institutions are still redeemable.
Years and years. British TV show about how everything is going to shit. Basically some of the stuff is OK - and it is an interesting premise, exploring the decay of the west.
However it is so full of lib shit I genuinely zoned out thru a lot of it. Let's see...
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'When you go far left it loops round again to the far right' actual horseshoe horseshit quote about the rise of the communist party in spain.
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The concentration camps are liberated by.... blowing up the jamming tower so people can video and broadcast what's happening there. Gonna say that my hopes were raised and immediately dashed when the rebels got a rocket launcher out.
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Everything bad was the fault of one person and they were a nasty icky populist. Oh and they used Fake News and Disinformation to rise to power.
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As per standard, nothing bad can ever be understood unless it's happening to a middle class family. The poorer relatives (and anyone poor really) are largely shown to be reactionary plebs who are dum dums unable to see thru the Fake News.
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Once they get rid of the Bad Person, stuff magically goes back to normal.
Not a clue I am afraid I watched it when it was on either Iplayer or more4 can't remember which.
Yeah that's it BBC Iplayer. I dunno how or if u will be able to watch it where you are as I am not that tech savvy but its showing for me in the UK
Fmovies has it. I watched the nuke episode like a year ago and it seemed really good but I don't think I'll watch the rest of it knowing all of the libshit.
Ah yeah sorry it's actually called years and years, I wasn't talking about it being years ago I saw it.
Like I said, if u want an insight into how libs percieve the world and how they think it can be fixed, it's worth a watch though it's unintentionally chilling when u realise that this is the dominant ideology that's dealing with a climate crisis.
Oh boy what a show, you weren't lying.
It does good anti communist propaganda and secures the standing of the Torries.
Also it blames the younger/middle aged generations for bad things instead of the old ones and the ones in power. Material conditions don't matter so much.
Pure ideology :zizek-preference:
"You wouldn't dare to arrest me on camera, a mother with her child", lol
Besides the depiction of the concentration camps look nicer than actual camps refugees are living in currently. It hypes moral paper tigers, but ignores realities.
I think my favourite bit is at the end where everything just pops back to normal. There's just zero understanding of any deeper reason behind what happened aside from 'the silly poors voted in a bad person.'
If you twisted my arm, the refugee subplot with that guy's boyfriend trying to get to safety wasn't terrible in a couple of places.
If you twisted my arm, the refugee subplot with that guy’s boyfriend trying to get to safety wasn’t terrible in a couple of places.
Yes, but we ought to skip over the power dynamics in the beginning and the lack of agency of "the boyfriend" for large sways (their perspective is mostly shown through the eyes of the middle class brits".
I think my favourite bit is at the end where everything just pops back to normal
During that time I really liked when the dad got three years in prison "cause of the gun" - but he used that time to learn Spanish - and is now teaching English to little kids in fascist ("communist") Spain. How is that supposed to be a good arc or sympathetic? He was a "banker" darn and learning Spanish is enough to get a job in a country adjacent to or part of the imperialist core to teach?
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It also shows that the system is good and most of the people using it are good and only some flawed individuals are to blame for the biggest problems of the system.
The most concentrated would be something like Wonder Woman 88 but everyone knows about that so instead I'll refer to an HBO documentary I saw recently titled Class Action Park. It's about Action Park, an amusement park which operated in New Jersey from the 70's to the 90's, and had a reputation for being incredibly dangerous. However, it felt more like a pet project by a group of angsty NYC Gen-Xers, reminiscing about their carefree youth and how this amusement park was the one place they were completely free, even at the danger of their own safety.
What I found really curious was that there were no statistics comparing it to other similar parks, so there was no way to tell whether or not it was any more dangerous than average (although it's not hard to imagine most parks of that sort in the US being deathtraps).
It also described the park's owner-operator in mixed terms, describing him as a sleazy charlatan, but also as a sort of reckless innovator. The park eventually shut down due to financial issues (nothing to do with its safety record), and it seemed to pull a George W after this, portraying him with a strange wistfulness, rather than any judgment regarding the people who died under his watch.
Why did I think it was so lib? Because it gets your attention with a promise of a look at "the most dangerous park in America" (without even trying to demonstrate that this is materially true), from the perspective of a bunch of smug New Yorkers (because NYC is literally the only place in the US that has any culture worth discussing), and builds up the nefarious character of the owner (only to redeem him as soon as the whole thing ends, attributing responsibility to the people who actually got hurt).
Then again, the last minute might actually undo my entire analysis, because it ends with some of the interviewees thinking back that this was their childhood, and then realizing "Wait, we're all kind of fucked up, aren't we?" And the VERY last shot features that wistful nostalgic waxing, but on top of a shot of a couple visiting the grave of their son who died in the park.
Regarding Action Park, one of the things that I found illuminating researching it was learning that while everyone hypes up the alpine slide and the waterslide with a loop that gave a lot of people skimmed elbows and bloody noses, the place where people died that caused the park to be shut down was the overcrowded, poorly-lifeguarded wave pool.
This was the only one near New York City, that's why. Because the rest of America doesn't exist except when you fly over it on the way to Los Angeles, the only other city in America.
Did you only recently view that for the first time?
That's like digging up a cursed mummy.
For me it is by a landslide the manga "Sanctuary" written by Sho Fumimura (Fist of the North Star) and nicely illustrated by Ryoichi Ikegami.
The basic premise is about two childhood friends who escaped gommunism as children and came back to Japan with intent to change the country. One of them joins the yakuza and the other goes into politics.
This manga is absolutely convinced that if you just do a powerplay with a smug face you instantly and magically win voters to your side. This manga has the president of the United States (Bill Clinton in spirit) visit a regional japanese campaign to shake hands with our main character, after our main character seduces and sexually conquers (Hillary Clinton in spirit). This manga sees the main character who joins the yakuza RAPIDLY ascend to the top, with an "I can change him" attitude towards the entire japanese mafia, turning them into Good People who are Highly Educated. The political platform that gives them political victory after political victory can be summed up as "what if japanese people worked harder and did better" as if that's not already the platform of Japan's ruling party. Basically, the whole manga is about two smug libs getting the heavens handed to them by pure virtue.
It's hard to convey just how intense this manga's :brainworms: are with mere words. It's page after page of the main characters doing a cool face and their opponents immediately eating shit, and the knock-on effect of that is something else.
I admit to reading the entire thing. It's enthralling, if only in the "I can't believe what the fuck I am reading" sense. Major misogyny content warning.
This is horrifying. We've got an officer injured just reading this :volcel-judge:
"I can change her... with my dick!" is a big part of Terry Goodkind garbage fires too.
Hmm, that's almost as bad as GATE trying to show how good the Japanese military is, if we could just get rid of this pesky constitutional limit on it being for "self defense"
