After seeing the success of I'm a Virgo and further back, The Boys on Amazon's streaming service, I've wondered exactly what is going on. Is this recuperation in action?
Commodification of anti-capitalism is pretty common now. It's not like people watching The Boys will do anything to hurt Amazon in the short or long term
Pretty much this. People enjoy the catharsis of anti-capitalist mdeia, but when was the last time someone assassinated a ceo on purpose fot anti-capitalist reasons?
Seeing anti-capitalist action performed on screen doesn't deepen revolutionary spirit it dampens it. It gives the viewer the cathartic experience of seeing resolution of the tensions they perceive/experience without ever having to achieve any revolutionary victory themselves.
I'm not saying this is why, I don't think the level of ideological control we experience is quite so intentional, but I also don't think it's a contradiction.
Also something something Mark Fisher that too.
That's the argument I hear all the time, and I'm not saying it's wrong, but how come that doesn't apply to other things? You'd never say a racist movie dampens people's racism or that a pro war film funded by the DoD dampens people's jingoism. And if you're making art, what are you supposed to do, steer clear of showing any positive representation of revolution?
Revolution requires active collective effort to achieve, while living in a racist and jingoistic society is the status quo. Mass media normalizes the actions of its heroes, and makes people comfortable with them. We don't want people comfortable about every else doing the revolution.
In fact, capitalist realism is very far from precluding a certain anti-capitalism. After all, and as Žižek has provocatively pointed out, anti-capitalism is widely disseminated in capitalism.
Time after time, the villain in Hollywood films will turn out to be the 'evil corporation'. Far from undermining capitalist realism, this gestural anti-capitalism actually reinforces it.
Take Disney/Pixar's Wall-E (2008). The film shows an earth so despoiled that human beings are no longer capable of inhabiting it. We're left in no doubt that consumer capitalism and corporations - or rather one mega-corporation, Buy n Large - is responsible for this depredation; and when we see eventually see the human beings in offworld exile, they are infantile and obese, interacting via screen interfaces, carried around in large motorized chairs, and supping indeterminate slop from cups.
What we have here is a vision of control and communication much as Jean Baudrillard understood it, in which subjugation no longer takes the form of a subordination to an extrinsic spectacle, but rather invites us to interact and participate. It seems that the cinema audience is itself the object of this satire.
But this kind of irony feeds rather than challenges capitalist realism. A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called 'interpassivity': the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity. The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief. ... capitalism can proceed perfectly well, in some ways better, without anyone making a case for it.
Žižek's counsel here remains invaluable. 'If the concept of ideology is the classic one in which the illusion is located in knowledge', he argues, then today's society must appear post-ideological: the prevailing ideology is that of cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions seriously. The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself. And at this level, we are of course far from being a post-ideological society. Cynical distance is just one way ... to blind ourselves to the structural power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.
- Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, is there no alternative
Capitalist realism. Look at all of the movies about bad rich people at the moment. Immensely profitable and basically about the people who produced the movie.
If it makes money, they're going to sell it.
I don't think people in charge of what gets on amazon prime are capitalist ideologues who smell leftist ideas and purge them on sight to ensure the status quo remains intact in the long term
It's incompetent executives who look at spreadsheets and focus groups to tell them what treats will make them the most money next quarter, they probably have no idea that The Boys contains leftist ideas, they probably just see it as "woah what if super heroes were evil"
Most Americans are too media and politically illiterate for the political messaging to be effective, tbh. Amazon, Disney, and the other media companies pay for media that can get them an ROI.
Whenever I point out the political subtext of something my stupid friends typically say something like “you overthink everything” and it takes all my energy to not shout back “you didn’t think about it at all! Did you enjoy the pretty lights and noises!?”
What's stopping you from saying "you under think everything" in response? I've been saying it for years as a response to "over thinking" (which I'll be the first to admit that I definitely do) and never lost a friend over it. Quite the contrary. Why does it make you so angry though?
If it makes money capitalists do it. I think it’s a good thing for people to be surrounded by media that is viciously hostile to the USA.
They also paid for the Expanse after it got cancelled. That one was weird, because everything indicated it only happened because Bezos was a fan of the show.
This should happen more, I want a billionaire to fund a HD remaster of DS9
What's wrong with the existing community made remasters? Near perfect imo
Everything was recorded on 35mm film originally, then scanned to tape with a telecine where the editing and effects was done meaning a huge loss of quality. The original film has far more detail than this picks up and can be re-scanned in HD/4K, it's just a huge amount of work needed to find the right footage for what was used in the original edit, scan it all and redo a lot of the sfx. It's been done for all of TNG and TOS, and even a few scenes of DS9 for the "What We Left Behind" documentary a few years ago, they just never committed the resources needed to do it for all of DS9.
The community done upscaling efforts are cool, one of the better uses for machine learning out there for sure, but there just isn't the information to reconstruct all the detail a real remaster can pick up.
If forced to choose between profitability and ideology, capitalism will choose profit. We talk about this a lot wrt rainbow capitalism, but it can cut the other way.
And STBY made a lot of money for how much it cost to produce.
Not really. They do something similar with actual historical radicals all the time. To quote Pat the Bunny:
Malcolm X never lived to see the government fall/ But the state he opposed made him a stamp/ Maybe that's the best you can hope for if you never give up: Your enemies will teach your corpse to dance
They do the same thing to our ideas via fiction.
yeah it literally is recuperation all this stuff is geared towards libs to make them feel good and
It might not be on an explicit level, but the underlying economic conditions and strategy of when they were produced (loans are basically free, buy everything you can before one of your 3 or 4 competitors do, keep cranking out content that looks like other shows/movies that people like) definitely give themselves to creating profitable/popular anti-capitalist media.
