Movies & TV

People have become wise to copaganda shows but all the period dramas about the monarchy or aristocracy are fash. Monarchy isn't le honorable nobles, it's the most regressive right-wing thing imaginable.

I watched the last game of thrones episode to participate in the "cultural event" and at some point when a bunch of nobles were gathered to decide the kingdom's successor someone suggested democracy. Everybody in attendance laughed but the camera shots were very carefully chosen not to show the good protagonist nobles joining in on the mirth.

Zootopia: racially essentialist allegory masquerading as a story about tolerance

This might be a strange one but 'Apocalypse Now' has one thing in particular for me that's completely inexcusable. Mainly that, for a film supposedly based on Heart of Darkness, a book that is very clearly critical of imperialism and racism, it completely inverts its message.

Like, on the face of it, it's anti-war, and even anti-US in that the US Army is shown as completely dysfunctional, run by cold-blooded psychopaths like the COs at the start who set Martin Sheen off to "terminate with extreme prejudice" or brain-fried madmen like the helicopter commander who just wants to surf, and it's shown how much damage and devastation the US has caused for no tangible gain (but then again, only in a 'why are we even here' type 'oops, the US accidentally stumbled into another war' kind of way).

But the whole film is from the perspective of the US, the Viet 'Cong' [sic] are never shown to be real people, just a nebulous menace lurking out of sight, and every sequence of the 'madness of war' is dripping with glorification of it. I mean, maybe this is shouldn't be a surprise, because it was written by John Milius, the guy who wrote Conan the Barbarian and fucking Red Dawn, but there's no way the film that contains the Ride of the Valkyries helicopter sequence can be said not to glorify war. It's like if the Starship Troopers film, while still supposedly intending to be a satire, was written by an actual fascist instead.

So in Heart of Darkness, when Marlow finds Kurtz, he's this emaciated, pathetic figure, who has gone insane in the wilderness of his ivory trading post and turned the area into his personal playground, cowing the local tribes with his guns and putting the heads of 'rebels' on pikes - and okay, the Africans are kind of passive and servile, but given that the novel was written in 1899 and the European colonialist is depicted as this savage, disgusting wretch it has to be given some credit. At best, he's a victim of his own power in a place where that makes him a god, and the natives of that place are his victims.

But in the film, Kurtz is a larger-than-life dominating presence, whose goal is not to fuck around in his personal kingdom but to keep fighting the war. When Marlow meets him after being captured, Kurtz gives a monologue (video), where he describes seeing a pile of children's arms that have been cut off. In real life, the Belgians committed horrific crimes like this against the Africans, but in Apocalypse now, the children had received vaccines from the US, and because of that their arms were cut off by Vietnamese soldiers. And that serves as the basis for his outright fascist screed about the power of will and shamelessness and the primordial instinct to kill and a bunch of other grade-A John Milius bullshit. And yes, the film presents him as insane, but more than that it presents him as a victim of the brutality of the colonized people resisting their oppressors.

That's an absolutely fucking unconscionable change to make and turns the whole thing inside-out. The horrific conditions of life for the Africans shown in Heart of Darkness were a paraphrasing of real historical crimes actually committed by real Belgian colonist monsters. Taking inspiration from that novel, but making the colonized people into the perpetrators of that crime is absolutely unforgivable and renders the whole film into true fascist apologia. Literally, utterly unforgivable.

PCU is an insane movie for trying to launder reactionary sentiments and nihilism as "cool". I also appreciated that the antagonists were the fraternity pricks, who had to exist in secret because they were banned. if only it were actually ever true.

but shout out to the Jake Busey as "Mersh" cameo (and the whole crew at Jerrytown) for still making me laugh 30 years later and Jon Favreau playing a dumbass trying to buy beer in small town Connecticut while extremely high/unable to handle his shit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B05QQIqHPAc

God help me, it still makes me laugh, I think because of the complete commitment of the actors to absurd characters.

The Fallout show, like fallout 3 and 4, completely sanitizes the universe. Most of the difficult questions about how a post-nuclear apocalypse world would continue are unanswered. It's just just lol so random it's a video game. I really did not like the writing of the show. I watched about half the first season at my friend's request and couldn't continue as a proud New Vegas neckbeard

Fuck PCU.

But to contribute I’ll mention one kids movie and one movie for older audiences that both rubbed me the wrong way.

For kids (and to flaunt my weeb credentials) we have Pokemon: Mewtwo strikes back. Mewtwo is disgusted with the ways humanity treats pokemon so they want to wipe out all life on earth save for them, and the clones they made. It’s a lighter version of PCU of the ubiquitous ‘evil antifascist’. Mewtwo may be sort of right, but they seek revenge instead of justice so that makes the former injustice ok. Also, Mewtwo decided to blame and wipe out all of humanity when they had a golden opportunity to just telekinetically blow up Giovanni, a leader of a corporation dedicated to exploiting pokemon. Thankfully, iirc the Japanese version was better and Mewtwo was more lost and confused like a proto-Zuko. But I still sort of like it because it is one of the first times Pokemon does unpack its own ethics, and Mewtwo continues as a sympathetic character in a later movie.

My dishonorable mention is idiocracy. We’ve analyzed it a bunch of times, but it could have been a huge warning of the dangers of anti-intellectualism in a way that I wish was touched up on in Fahrenheit 451, but it had to do the “it’s poor people’s fault for trusting the fascist porks they hold so dear!” (Being a reactionary isn’t metaphysical you fucking lib!) it would have been handled a lot better if the “idiots” were revealed to be perfectly intelligent but faked stupidity because they want to be ‘cool’ or were just trying to look macho or something. Plus I think it would have been hilarious if there was a scene where there was a stereotypical jock and cheerleader reading Plato for fun, were caught by the protagonist and begged him not to tell anyone they were “closet geeks”.

Finally the big one I want to touch up on is the Star Wars prequel and sequels, I think it made a mistake by adding an explanation to the space magic, like power levels from dragon ball but the film expects you to take it seriously. Finally the demonization of anger. Sure, part of the film was showing how the Jedi dogma bit it in the ass, but our last impressions of the Star Wars characters for years should not have been that dogma. Also, I really did not like Kylo’s forced redemption in the sequels. Rey should have just turned him to ash with force lightning in the first film, had all the chuds cry that the character that resembles them got destroyed and had Rey tackle a whole new threat altogether that wasn’t a literal rehash of the old villains. There’s so much of the expanded universe they could draw from.

I only have seen a small slice of it but since Succession didn't include any Little Saint James scenes to my knowledge I can only imagine that its fascist apologia has been wholly, gleefully swallowed.

What's PCU?

My pick has to be freakonomics or zeitgeist Haven't watched either since I was a kid, but I don't remember either of them having a particularly strong point to make, more just being a string of neolib observations to make libs feel smart. I remember there being elements of social darwinism in both though.