This is why anti-heroes never work in movies, they always become straight forward heroes in the audience's mind irrespective of the filmmakers' intentions. At the same time films have such a powerfully hypnotic and visceral effect that you could get an absolutely bone-chilling depiction of capitalist horrors up there on the screen that could have a profound impact. To my mind no one has explicitly tried though, except for maybe Aronofsky with "Mother!". Although even then it's about humans treating nature in general rather than exploitative hierarchy systems in particular. Maybe "99 francs", though again that one is more focused on the ills of the advertising industry.
One of my favorite book series is The First Law by Joe Abercrombie. It's a fantasy book, not high literature or anything, a subversion of classic Sword and Sorcery and also Epic Fantasy.
A big part of the reason I like this book series so much is that it starts out by introducing you to one of the main characters, this grizzled veteran. He talks a lot about doing things he regrets and trying to become a better person and, importantly, he leaves his homeland and goes to a different place. Sometimes we meet characters that knew him and they confirm he was hated and feared, but we don't get to see the wars he fought in or the scale of the evil he may of done. So we are kinda lead to assume he's just a soldier with a guilty conscience. Then, in the last book in the trilogy, he goes home again, and decides that trying to be a better person hasn't won him anything, and the reader is finally forced to see that this guy is exactly who he told you he was all along: a monster, with no conscience, no compunctions. It still falls into a thing where I love the violence, so I don't necessarily want this incredibly violent person to die because then the violence will be over, but at the same time he kills or hurts a number of characters I'd come to like over the course of the series, so it would be incredibly cathartic to see him get his just desserts.
The author goes on to repeat this trick in most of the books he's written, and fuck me I love it every time.
Also, in the film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (jesus christ, you're referencing Aronofsky and a motherfucking French film I've never even heard of and I'm talking about mainstream Fantasy and a goddamn Star Wars movie. I promise I've seen and read real art, but no fuck me pop stuff can be good too why am I self-conscious about liking what I like) there's that scene at the end where Darth Vader shows up and kills a bunch of nobody rebels and all the fans collectively orgasmed. And all I could think watching that scene was, if the movie had done it's job of building up interesting, relatable, likable characters and then this monster loomed out of the dark and murdered all of them it would be horrifying and grim and tragic.
That actually sounds like really good storytelling. I love it when books or films give you this very vague and subtle gut feeling of things going horribly wrong but you can't quite articulate how or why, or what it is even that feels off. A great example is how at least half the viewers could have sworn they saw the head in the box in Se7en but it was never shown. Hell I was pretty sure myself it was quasi-subliminaly flashed for a moment on the screen and had to go back and rewatch the ending.
Btw, I just remembered another title with explicitly anti-imperialist messaging that's pretty effective emotionally - Black Sails. It's a TV series rather than a movie but was no less cinematic than stuff made for the big screen. It's also the one and only serious no holds barred pirate "movie", despite the history of on-screen pirate renditions being as old as cinema itself.
I've been meaning to watch Black Sails for a while, pirates and naval stuff in general has always fascinated me since I was a kid and the first Pirates of the Caribbean came out.
I was talking with some friends about our favorite films this year, and I think mine has to be Uncut Gems. Just the sense of dread and anxiety that builds up through that film is crazy. I was having a particularly bad week when I went to see it in theaters, in the time before COVID, and I had an intense reaction, almost a anxiety attack watching the movie- and I'm normally a pretty calm person, I don't get anxiety attacks. I liked Sorry to Bother You, obviously Boots Riley has got good politics, but surrealism just never quite works for me. Living in the midst of capitalism is already so crazy, figures like Elon Musk or Jeffrey Epstein or Mark Zuckerberg are already so evil that turning them into over-the-top caricatures just dilutes the message for me. I feel bad because I didn't like Invisible Man for similar reasons, even though Ralph Ellison definitely had good politics, and both works are explicitly about black liberation, but for whatever reason surrealism just doesn't jive with me.
This is why anti-heroes never work in movies, they always become straight forward heroes in the audience's mind irrespective of the filmmakers' intentions. At the same time films have such a powerfully hypnotic and visceral effect that you could get an absolutely bone-chilling depiction of capitalist horrors up there on the screen that could have a profound impact. To my mind no one has explicitly tried though, except for maybe Aronofsky with "Mother!". Although even then it's about humans treating nature in general rather than exploitative hierarchy systems in particular. Maybe "99 francs", though again that one is more focused on the ills of the advertising industry.
One of my favorite book series is The First Law by Joe Abercrombie. It's a fantasy book, not high literature or anything, a subversion of classic Sword and Sorcery and also Epic Fantasy.
A big part of the reason I like this book series so much is that it starts out by introducing you to one of the main characters, this grizzled veteran. He talks a lot about doing things he regrets and trying to become a better person and, importantly, he leaves his homeland and goes to a different place. Sometimes we meet characters that knew him and they confirm he was hated and feared, but we don't get to see the wars he fought in or the scale of the evil he may of done. So we are kinda lead to assume he's just a soldier with a guilty conscience. Then, in the last book in the trilogy, he goes home again, and decides that trying to be a better person hasn't won him anything, and the reader is finally forced to see that this guy is exactly who he told you he was all along: a monster, with no conscience, no compunctions. It still falls into a thing where I love the violence, so I don't necessarily want this incredibly violent person to die because then the violence will be over, but at the same time he kills or hurts a number of characters I'd come to like over the course of the series, so it would be incredibly cathartic to see him get his just desserts.
The author goes on to repeat this trick in most of the books he's written, and fuck me I love it every time.
Also, in the film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (jesus christ, you're referencing Aronofsky and a motherfucking French film I've never even heard of and I'm talking about mainstream Fantasy and a goddamn Star Wars movie. I promise I've seen and read real art, but no fuck me pop stuff can be good too why am I self-conscious about liking what I like) there's that scene at the end where Darth Vader shows up and kills a bunch of nobody rebels and all the fans collectively orgasmed. And all I could think watching that scene was, if the movie had done it's job of building up interesting, relatable, likable characters and then this monster loomed out of the dark and murdered all of them it would be horrifying and grim and tragic.
That actually sounds like really good storytelling. I love it when books or films give you this very vague and subtle gut feeling of things going horribly wrong but you can't quite articulate how or why, or what it is even that feels off. A great example is how at least half the viewers could have sworn they saw the head in the box in Se7en but it was never shown. Hell I was pretty sure myself it was quasi-subliminaly flashed for a moment on the screen and had to go back and rewatch the ending.
Btw, I just remembered another title with explicitly anti-imperialist messaging that's pretty effective emotionally - Black Sails. It's a TV series rather than a movie but was no less cinematic than stuff made for the big screen. It's also the one and only serious no holds barred pirate "movie", despite the history of on-screen pirate renditions being as old as cinema itself.
I've been meaning to watch Black Sails for a while, pirates and naval stuff in general has always fascinated me since I was a kid and the first Pirates of the Caribbean came out.
I was talking with some friends about our favorite films this year, and I think mine has to be Uncut Gems. Just the sense of dread and anxiety that builds up through that film is crazy. I was having a particularly bad week when I went to see it in theaters, in the time before COVID, and I had an intense reaction, almost a anxiety attack watching the movie- and I'm normally a pretty calm person, I don't get anxiety attacks. I liked Sorry to Bother You, obviously Boots Riley has got good politics, but surrealism just never quite works for me. Living in the midst of capitalism is already so crazy, figures like Elon Musk or Jeffrey Epstein or Mark Zuckerberg are already so evil that turning them into over-the-top caricatures just dilutes the message for me. I feel bad because I didn't like Invisible Man for similar reasons, even though Ralph Ellison definitely had good politics, and both works are explicitly about black liberation, but for whatever reason surrealism just doesn't jive with me.