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A couple of culture war threads ago, I complained about the badly written background politics and geopolitics in films like Captain America: Civil War. Having binged more MCU and thought more about how forgettable many of the plots are since, I've come to the conclusion that I'm being unfair to the writers: they are absolutely not hacks, given I think they generally do a great job of writing dialogue and capturing nuances in human relationships; if they suck at framing the broader story in a plausible and logical manner, that's because producers/critics/the public don't want them to try.
In other words, everything is superheroes nowadays not just because people pay to watch IP, but because writers then get to have their heroes fight imaginary supervillains instead of real-world problems, which come with ideological blowback. Did you really think there are producers willing to front $100mm to make a movie about Gaza, inflation, illegal migrants, Trump, covid, BLM, metoo, or climate change? OK, maybe Don't Look Up is a weak example, but it's still just an allegory. Make a $100mm sequel that explicitly has a team of plucky heroes go blow up the HQ of an oil major and poison those bloated cows and fat farmers in Nebraska and I'll eat my hat.
Even if movies are primarily entertainment, I think most people derive significant utility from the belief that they can learn from them. It's nifty to be exposed to military jargon and special ops tactics, or detectives picking up psychological clues, or a fictional couple sorting out conflicts that can serve as a blueprint for how we navigate our own romance. Except ideological blowback has emptied this utility bucket for films that cannot risk turning off "either side" to recuperate their ridiculous budgets--sorry, you won't actually learn anything about Russia's actual red line when it comes to NATO expansion or China's red line when it comes to Taiwanese independence in Avengers 5 or Top Gun 3. And don't count on Spider-Man 4 to explore "anti-Asian hate" or school choice in NYC, or Captain America 4 to beat up the national debt. If there is ever to be a climactic scene in a new major picture where the hero kills the militants hiding behind civilian human shields, I can be absolutely certain that a) the militants won't be ambiguously underage, b) the civilian won't be portrayed as possibly supportive of the militant cause, c) the hero will have her (or their) cake and eat it too, and manages to defeat the baddies without accepting any collateral damage, because movie writers don't ever humor trolley problems.
As I noted at the start, don't hate the player, hate the game. No movie writer will be able to sell a script depicting a truly realistically powerful antagonist who's not a fanatical space Nazi because the culture war has made it impossible for moviegoers to be actually terrified while watching an expensively produced drama, because anything that's ever actually kept anyone up at night--Gaza, inflation, illegal migrants, Trump, covid, BLM, metoo, or climate change--is completely commercially taboo once the budget exceeds $100mm.
Then doubt crept in. In case I'm just as full of shit, I thought, what if an eccentric billionaire gave me $100mm to shoot a movie? What's the scariest yet logically coherent and real-life-plausible premise I can think of? A quick and dirty answer--a shadowy and nominally decentralized crypto organization becomes the fourth branch of U.S. government when it methodically incentivizes low level violence/terror against ideological enemies, thus ushering in massive, visible change on the ground.
Depending on which party is in power in the US, this group can be far left or far right; but seeing most institutions are captured by the left regardless of electoral outcomes, this movie probably works better if it featured a far right terror group. Ergo, the group recognizes the strange phenomenon of climate change protesters seemingly only blocking roads in first world countries within sight of police protection rather than lie down in neighborhoods belonging to street gangs or drug cartels. It thus decides to impose a real cost on the previously free virtue signaling. The next time pro-Palestine students and faculty camp out at an Ivy League lawn, it issues a crypto fatwa and bounty. An impressionable young man with low inhibition who didn't need much excuse to commit violence executes a drive by shooting. Then the group releases the name, photo, and middle school address of a child of a university president who's too tolerant of the encampments. Ben & Jerry founders speak out again? Fatwa, and some crazy adherent drives a truck into an ice cream store. Do this a few times, and even if few people actually die, all of a sudden, there is a ton of pressure on the encampments to get shut down if only "for the students' own safety," and maybe the ice cream's X account goes dark "for the staff's own safety."
What's the story, exactly? We could introduce the hero initially as one of these disaffected and troubled hired hands, and maybe he partially succeeds in an act of terror, and that causes him to snap out of a dark spiral, and he resolves to make things right by trying to uncover who's behind this shadowy group. I've got a natural sequel, too, where the opposite ideological camp sees how effective this is and decides to take up arms and form its own underground militant wing and starts shooting up megachurches or something. I don't know. I've thought about this for the run time of a movie. I'm sure you can think of a much better plot, but my point is, at least this premise is more interesting than the twelfth iteration of evil space Nazis. I argue it's scarier too because it's far more plausible, which brings me to my question--sorry for burying the lede.
Is it actually plausible? Why don't we see this play out in real life? America has plenty of violent crime, but it's all unorganized violent crime, which doesn't translate to power. With all the technology and guns and tribalism, why is there so little organized political or ideological violence (people getting shoved or pepper sprayed don't count)? Is literally everyone north of Mexico just larping? I get that if you're about to graduate from Columbia and take up a $200k job at Goldman Sachs, that it won't be worth going to prison for a decade to make the protesters pay, but surely there is one terminally ill billionaire who's got like three years left to live who has enough executive functioning and megalomania to be the shadowy prophet and at least attempt something as radical? With all the technology available today, you don't even need to be a billionaire, really. Probably something like $50mm is good enough to seed a sufficient number of "fatwas" to be a highly effective terrorist that changes the behavior of the masses. So what gives?
To preempt a few responses, it doesn't seem persuasive to argue the US has a strong justice system. After all, crime is illegal, yet we get plenty of those. The premise here is a determined leader exploits the distributed nature of unorganized crime to make stopping it impossible. I also don't think executing this is particularly difficult; you don't need to be Russia, you just need to be Hamas, and a handful of low-tech sporadic episodes of violence is enough to change behavior for the masses, because the number of people actually willing to risk death for their beliefs is a lot smaller than the rest; sure, maybe 5% of the protesters don't care about getting shot at, but five tents is a lot less politically salient than one hundred.
I think the reason few to no people do this is because it would be ineffective. Political violence in modern society benefits the other side. Israel was popular on 10/8, it gets less popular with every day it continues its counter terrorism campaign. Jan 6 is the primary thing keeping the Democratic party viable. Kent State is still trumpeted by the hippies. If anything, this plan would work best if you executed a bunch of false flag attacks and somehow werent caught out. One could argue that is what the FBI did with the Whitmer "Kidnapping attack", and that was used as a successful talking point until it collapsed. If you wanted Joe Biden re-elected probably the best thing to happen would be a failed assassination attack on him by someone wearing a MAGA hat and Alex Jones brand cowboy boots.* The problem with the false flag plan, is it only works if you dont get caught. And you probably would. Because the only kind of dumbass who takes $50k to assassinate Joe Biden wearing a MAGA hat is too dumb to not get caught, and not nearly loyal enough to not tell the investigators that he was told to wear the MAGA hat by the guy on the internet. And at that point your whole strategy is about the authorities intentionally covering up your scheme until after election day. Which they might, because they do probably lean Biden. But as the Hillary emails situation demonstrated, it only takes a few principled leakers to blow up LE's plan to cover something up until after election day.
So no, these scemes require the participation of true believers. Like Hamas, where the soldiers know they are going to die (and so do the women and children) and they understand that their deaths are a propaganda victory. Similar to how machine politics works in cities to manufacture grey and illegal votes. Its all loyal insiders who sometimes, yes, are financially rewarded, but the other motivations are stronger.
*Disclaimer, I do not know if this product exists.
I’d say rather that political violence only ever benefits the Left. Feminists bombed the Capitol building, Puerto Rican nationalists shot up Congress, the Weathermen and black nationalists conducted terror campaigns, Black Lives Matter protestors burned down and looted major cities, but none of these seem to do or have done anything to tamper enthusiasm for their respective causes.
Historically, leftist violence translates into rightist takeovers. Either an authoritarian faction within the left (Stalin within the Bolsheviks) or a rightist ally backstabs (mullahs and Muslim Brotherhood against Arab socialists) or a conservative swoops in to reign over the ashes of the Left (Franco? Fujimori? probably other examples).
Political violence benefits the left only if we view the effect of violence as 'no consequences'. In terms of achieving practical results, it needs a rightist element to coopt the cause of, or exploit the damage caused by, the leftist violence. At no point do the organizers of leftist violence seem to have achieved their stated objectives.
Leftist violence currently is temporary chaos, violence that flares which can be cleaned up. Chavez and Stalin draped themselves in leftist skinsuits but were able to wield the power of a state to effect real change (damage).
The left is insidious, but the right is where true power will be exercised. And the left is blind to wolves amongst its flock.
[Population-level observation ahead]
Leftist violence is female-coded, and rightist violence is male-coded, almost like they're the same thing and always have been. You see the same shit in abusive marriages; the woman throws shit and has tantrums, might slap or hit the man, but none of her goals are accomplished unless the man gives in (this is ignoring "split up" as an option).
This is why men, as a general rule, don't hit women- because their superpower is that they're the only ones with actual power. So they'll bear the occasional slap and punch and thrown vase from their wives when she doesn't get her way, but at the end of the day he's the one who decides which checks get written. As such, this violence is the 'no consequences, or results in token concessions' type.
But if a man discovers that he can use [individually impotent but] violent women to abuse other men on his behalf (which is how the Inner and Outer Parties of 1984 function), then things get a lot more interesting. Which is why authoritarian movements tend to use female-coded language- "equity" and "safety" are the two popular ones- so that the men who would normally and trivially resist simply fail to show up, making the opposition easier to rout.
This is Genesis 1 stuff. The serpent must corrupt the woman in order for the man to eat the fruit.
It's hard for me to see why these words are "female-coded". For example, they were explicitly two of the main reasons for the founding fathers of the US to launch their revolution, and I don't know anyone who sees the founding fathers as female-coded figures.
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You could also point to Trump's ascendancy first over DeSantis and then Biden as a backlash to the lawfare. But I think this theory is inherently a bit contradictory and will fail when taken too far, since it essentially presumes all victories to be pyrrhic. There are plenty of examples where wins are in fact wins: CCP did not fall after crushing student protesters in 1989, Iran did not liberalize after women revolted, and Russia does not appear to be heading to strategic defeat in Ukraine. In the movie premise I hypothesized, I think "victory" is plausible for the shadowy prophet if he defines end goals as eliminating campus encampments and corporate wokeposting--changing visible behavior given the newly introduced cost of violence seems a lot more achievable than actually changing minds, which may be "good enough."
Well the caveat to the theory appears to be whether the post WWII American public's opinion is relevant to your particular political question. And I suppose precluding a total victory ala CCP 1989.
I will not discount the reality that if January 6th was the JANUARY 6TH! that Democrats pretend it to be, and thousands of armed MAGA men showed up to the Capitol, sacked it, beheaded a bunch of Democrats, proclaimed Trump God-Emperor, and the local national guard rolled in having their back, that would be actually effective street violence.
I just dont think that is something a shadowy right wing billionaire could fund and achieve. Heck, I don't think a cabal of 25 billionaires could.
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I've actually wondered about this off and on. There seems to be remarkably little organized political violence in America despite the high cultural and political tensions. There have been many times and places where such tensions would have resulted in hot Civil War. I'm defining organized violence as multiple people actively planning to commit some specific act of violence in advance, so showing up to a protest, even with weapons and armor, but without any plans for specific acts of violence, doesn't count.
I'd also note that substantial terrorist / insurgent violence has happened many times in many countries, and it seems the source is very rarely a particularly wealthy individual.
My best guess is that FBI undercover sting operations have done a tremendous job of poisoning the well against any significant group turning to violence. Run a countless stream of undercovers and CIs pushing violent plans so that you can bust anyone who follows along, in every group for every ideology. Make sure you publish all of the details about it every time. Pretty soon, anyone who proposes any type of violence will be suspected of being a Fed infiltrator, or somebody recently turned by them for some reason.
This is probably a good thing if you actually don't want lots of violence, the chaos of a failed state, etc. But it does make you wonder exactly what happens if the tensions just keep rising, but nobody ever does any real violence.
Which does bring us back to - you can write a movie or book about anything. But if we're talking about reality, or concerned about being realistic, how does our generic eccentric billionaire find people who aren't total losers to commit violence? Anyone with any clue would suspect they're being set up. Maybe you can find some of those losers, but they usually don't seem to be that good at working in teams or following instructions.
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Several of these predate some of the modern culture wars. Several of them you may not have heard of - or if you have heard of them, you may not understand how they pertain to the items on your list. Only one was a major financial hit, and two made a loss. These three points probably illustrate the point you're trying to make quite well.
Good examples. I probably should have excluded climate change, because I guess it really isn't all that politically salient, not even breaking into the top 10 of most important voter issues for the 2004 election or 2020 (when ranking by extremely + very important), and this probably makes making an expensive movie about it less risky.
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I'm curious to see how Coppola's new film Megalopolis comes out, especially as he's sinking so much of his own money in it. Not curious enough to try to find someone to watch my kids, probably, but in other circumstances I would actually go to the theaters for it, something I haven't done for about 8 years.
My girlfriend normally would never go see a science fiction film, but she loves classic directors so I’m hoping I can rope her into seeing this one with the Coppola name as the draw.
I'm not a film guy, but is Coppola a ladies-famous director? Apocalypse Now, Patton, American Graffiti, a biography of Yukio Mishima...
If she'd find that list appealing, why the hell is she still your girlfriend instead of your wife?
She likes Oscar-bait that’s actually good, that’s the only way I can describe it. She really likes dark movies with moral complexity. She liked The Godfather. Her favorite directors are Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. She loved Taxi Driver, Wolf of Wall Street, and Shutter Island. We watched American Graffiti and we both thought it was interesting although obviously not a plot-filled movie. She loved Goodfellas and insisted on seeing Once Upon A Time In Hollywood in theaters.
She also likes chick films, Titanic was her favorite movie. And she definitely reads chick-lit, albeit literary chick-lit. Though she does complain that publishers aren't printing anything for men and that's weird.
But I don’t know, she just has a thing for dark films from directors who are very passionate about their work. She watches cast interviews for the films she likes and thinks about the directoral choices.
Inception got the closest to science fiction that she'd go, she has never liked spaceships or aliens or wizards or anything like that. Just not really her thing. She likes realistic fiction. And Inception, apparently. She's expressed admiration for Coppola before, so that's why I think it might be a draw.
She will be.
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I'd count Logan as being about illegal immigration.
When District 9 came out in 2009 it wasn't 100% clear if it was supposed to be about apartheid or about illegal immigration. (South Africa was having a problem at the time with illegal immigration from Zimbabwe). It was a critical and commercial success.
IIRC the vox pop shots at the beginning with the people complaining about the “aliens” was repurposed real news footage of interviews with people from Joburg talking about the immigration crisis.
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These damn mutants seeking entry into CANADA!
Logan is the best of all superhero movies, and it had plenty of bog standard leftist agitprop (capitalism, mental health, racism, eugenics) but honestly illegal immigration is a bit of a stretch. The mexican nurse is only at the beginning, and has little direct involvement. And Logan is a US citizen so bim crossing the border isn't an issue.
Heres hoping Deadpool 3 has lots of jokes about each dimension traveller being an illegal alien. Looking forward to that.
Wolverine wasn't the illegal immigrant standin. The mutant farm was in Mexico and Laura spoke mostly Spanish.
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Has there ever been a movie about inflation that isn't a documentary?
You might actually consider Parasite here. In fact I’m astonished it hasn’t been mentioned. Sure, not Hollywood. But it was popular and did have Western distribution.
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Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory?
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For the most part, at least for now, none of the problems being discussed affect those fighting them (or their families) personally. In most serious wars the stakes are much higher. It’s not “some school a thousand miles away teaching kids things I hate,” it’s your kids school and his teacher. It’s not flags and rainbows in business, it’s toe the line or go to jail. When it’s coming with a heavy cost to people, they’ll be much more likely to fight in Ernest than if it remains mostly a theoretical harm that you actually don’t even have to care about.
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Want to make your theoretical movie even more interesting? Make two versions of the movie and release them simultaneously. In one the extremists are right wing and the government is left wing. In the other, the extremists are left wing and the government is right wing . Create a realistic portrayal of both sides, not cartoon villainy, and see how they both do.
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West World season 3 started with such a doordash for crime app, doing nothing with it. Search "RICO app". The big bad is actually using it to eliminate opponents or aberrations. (N.b. the show's not very good, I didn't finish.)
Someone else here (my notes summarize it without a source) once mentioned Schmidt's Theory of the Partisan which describes mob violence as the regime's political force. The liberal total state features the state restraining or permitting violence, where state violence against dissidents occurs through the criminal underclass whom the state chooses not to persecute (for gang violence, muggings etc.) Party NGOs enable street thugs and doxxing groups.
Westworld season 1 is maybe my favorite piece of television of all time. Season 2 was pretty interesting. Season 3 was awful.
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Someone remembered that post!
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You can just buy outcomes with money rather than mucking about with violence. Take Soros. He finances candidates for office, high and low. He funds NGOs that train up ideological cadres and create a bunch of agitators and activists. I don't know, maybe Soros dips his toe into violence from time to time. But the vast majority of his effort is peaceful, putting end results to one side.
There's no opposition like there would be for violence. Post 1945 Liberal democracies have zero defence mechanism against this kind of nudge-nudge bribe-bribe mobilize-cadres sort of thing. If you do this in China, the state will harass you and make your life miserable. See the Beijing LGBT center, the police kept messing with them until they gave up and closed down.
Of course, it's a very different story for the right. They're not civil society groups or reformers, they spread dangerous misinformation or are far-right extremist radicals. AFD experiences similar kinds of suppression. Trump is being suppressed. There are voices ready to tell them 'no!' whereas the left gets to act more freely.
The left doesn't need violence to get what they want (though they can use it to a certain extent), the right can't afford to use it for much the same reasons that political violence doesn't happen in China. It makes more sense to spend time and effort building up cadres, though this is somewhat harder for them.
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