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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.
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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