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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10757 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026

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“Citizen Vigilante" - some musings (omega-doxxing myself, hence the throwaway account)

I was 14 years old and bored on a Saturday afternoon at a friend’s house. We cajoled their older sibling into driving us and Shanghai’d a couple girls into a ‘date’ at the nearest movie theater.

Back in those days, one either called Mr. Moviefone for showtimes - please say the name of the movie you’d like to see, now - or just took pot luck when showing up.

And you really didn’t have to call Mr. Moviefone, because pot luck was always something great. For context, that year some of the top movies were: Spider Man 3, Transformers, Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Harry Potter 5, The Bourne Ultimatum, 300, I am Legend, Night at the Museum, National Treasure 2, American Gangster, Blades of Glory, Superbad, Ocean’s Thirteen, Evan Almighty, Beowulf, 3:10 to Yuma, The Kingdom, No Country for Old Men, The Heartbreak Kid, Charlie Wilson’s War, Michael Clayton, Stardust, Children of Men, Zodiac…yadda yadda, left quite a few out.

But on this particular afternoon the terrifically memorable movie we took pot luck on was some generic fantasy action thing called ‘In the Name of the King’ by director Uwe Boll. I don’t remember anything really about the movie except it starred Jason Statham and at one point my friend nudged me and said ‘this sucks, should we just leave?’. My buddy's instincts were spot on as that movie somehow lost more than $50 million back when that was a lot of money and Mr. Boll won worst director of the year.

To this day it's the only movie I ever walked out of after paying for, other than a few years later when watching the 2010 Robin Hood with Russell Crowe, but that was only because the guy working the sound system had it turned up to ‘permanent hearing damage’ levels. More to that story, but for another time.

Anyway, the point being my only previous exposure to Uwe Boll was that his product was genuinely unwatchable. Coming back to the present, you can imagine my surprise in seeing his name attached over and over in reference to the hottest new piece of media to-the-right-of Rosa Luxemburg.

‘Citizen Vigilante’ starring Armie Hammer (yeah, that guy from ‘The Social Network’ who got MeToo’d) is (roughly) about an American who goes to Europe and conducts a highly restrained and well-planned vendetta against foreign gang rapists and their institutional enablers.

The film begins with an extended sequence of a pretty-but-harried mother and her six or so year old son shopping in a typical tiny European grocery store. The boy asks for chocolates and the mother indulgently relents, but when he asks for another treat she says he’s had enough. Her son helps pack up their purchases in their reusable bag while she makes small talk with the portly-but-friendly cashier. As they're walking home, a visibly foreign man stabs her in the neck, and she bleeds out while her son tries feebly to understand what just happened.

This isn’t meant to be a summary of the movie as you can get that anywhere, and anyway it is not that complicated. This is about the cultural implications. I’m gonna make a listicle so you can pick and choose any part you’re interested in discussing:

  1. The movie is passably watchable enough that Mr. Boll must have really learned from his many, many failures to put this together. There are too many Dutch angles, too many quick cuts, the chronology is a mess, the dialogue is wooden, the soundtrack is a crime, but altogether this is a solid 5/10. Although I’m really trying not to be ideologically biased, the acting was quite good (especially the rape victims, which is relevant if a bit morbid), a fair portion of the scenes held some real tension, the effects were up to par enough to not take you out of the story, and, there was a verisimilitude that’s sorely lacking in a lot of contemporary productions.

  2. The topic covered is absolutely explosive, en vogue, and has some pretty undeniable aspects. Regardless of the numbers of victims or perpetrators involved, there is a culture of sexual violence common to non-European countries that’s produced some shockingly poor results. Not just upon introduction, but also with what I will laconically describe as a cheeky bit of help from above along the way.

  3. There’s a recurring motif in the film of social media accounts actively encouraging the protagonist about his work that's been reflected in reality as some fairly mainstream voices have picked up the call. Jack Posobiec is hardly a hard-right figure and he’s been tweeting about it all day.

  4. The movie was ‘banned’ in Germany (the director’s home country) by being denied a rating so it therefore couldn’t be released. What do the kids call the ‘Streissand Effect’ these days?

  5. There’s a door opening here for more media like this. Sometimes righteous movements find odd champions, maybe the guy who is colloquially known as perhaps the worst director of all time just became one? If this is the only cultural response to “One Battle After Another” it’s already firmly in the ‘not bad’ category. But if it’s only the first?

Curious for your thoughts, any signal here or just noise?

To this day it's the only movie I ever walked out of after paying for,

Same, only movie I've walked out on.

I saw that movie at a dollar theater on a 100 degree day when my apartment didn't have air conditioning.

I still almost walked out.

In some ways it's quite an accomplishment, to have made a movie so remarkably bad that almost twenty years later we still have feelings about it

‘Citizen Vigilante’ starring Armie Hammer (yeah, that guy from ‘The Social Network’ who got MeToo’d) is (roughly) about an American who goes to Europe and conducts a highly restrained and well-planned vendetta against foreign gang rapists and their institutional enablers.

It sounds like a pretty straightforward remake of Taken.

It's an interesting affirmation that everyone understands and acts on racist phenomena.

"Taken" doesn't code 'the outsiders are harming us' i.e. whites, but this movie does. So the almonds of some German bureaucrat got activated and the movie is a no go.

It's probably the most ubiquitous and interesting dynamic in western media production and no one talks about it. But the incredible dance around never having the outsider victimizing whites is the greatest commonality all modern movies share. And if that is ever a theme, it's explored in such a way as to demonstrate that whites feeling victimized and acting on those emotions are wrong in some way.

On the flipside there's no shortage of 'brown person victimized by cruel evil white folk' movies.

Everyone understands this. Everyone knows. The only difference is whether ones brain can see the patterns or if it can and chooses to ignore it because 'evil white people' codes as real on some level in ones brain.

Taken is totally about a threat to white girls by scary foreigners, though.

Maybe to an American? When I saw the movie the entire concept felt a bit far fetched and cheap.

In reality the ones 'taken' are usually young eastern European women forced into commercial rape, i.e. 'sex work'. But in the movie it's evil eastern European men taking an American girl? Not to say that there aren't a lot of evil eastern European men driving up western European crime, there are. But the movie felt like a sanitized version of that reality.

Regardless of that, calling the foreigner a foreigner or an immigrant like is done in the movie is different from actually depicting him as a foreigner. The distinction is best exemplified via depictions by Cleon Peterson.

In an American context, the traffickers are clearly 'generic foreigners'. They could be Eastern Euros, they could be middle eastern, they're from a part of the world Americans don't understand and that's what's important. They might code as brown, probably do to most Americans.

My theory is that whites are the most prone to racism (scientific racism pioneered by whites, etc) and so they should be protected from media that triggers their racism.

Depends on what you mean by scientific racism. From my understanding of the term, White people didn't 'invent' 'modern science' because of racism, I would argue. It's because of other factors we generally associate with intelligence, industriousness, agreeableness and so forth. Scientific 'racism' is just a byproduct of that. So whilst there is some racist expression to be found in old 18th century anthropology, I'd argue most of that was also refuted by the better scientists at the time, who could make fact based observations about human population differences.

To clarify the point: Noticing that groups can differ on objective metrics free of 'group bias' is a very not racist thing to do. Even if those differences are 'racist'. Whilst ignoring or arguing against objective reality, based on 'in or outgroup bias' is a racist thing. So ironically, most people who are against 'scientific racism' are acting out a very base racist impulse, since they are not capable of parsing reality past it looking like a slight against their ingroup.

To that extent I'd argue most whites are less racist than other groups. As they are more capable of parsing reality and more capable of entertaining abstract concepts. A good example of this are mock jury trials.

“When racial issues arise in a trial, white mock jurors are on guard against the possibility of prejudicial feelings and maintain the appearance of fairness [...] Black mock jurors, on the other hand, do not demonstrate egalitarianism in any condition.”

On top of that, a lot of research into the topic drives at a similar conclusion:

On the other hand, there is evidence from the social psychological literature that the self-concept of ethnic minorities may be more dependent upon perceptions of race than the self-concept of the ethnic majority. For example, Clark (1985) reported that Black participants’ self-concept was related to their ratings of Blacks, whereas the same relationship was not found with White participants. Grier and Deshpande (2001) further reported that Black participants placed a higher importance on race than did White participants, and that this racial importance predicted consumer decisions. It is possible that group identity may be stronger among minorities than among majority race individuals, making minority jurors more likely to exhibit an own-race bias.

The study linked above also shows highlighted that in mock jury trials, the whites are a minority in their racial fairness. At least when compared with American blacks. Who are a lot more prone to racial bias in their decision making.

Considering all of that, I'd say it's clear whites are not being protected from their own racist tendencies, a concept explored in the movie 28 Days Later but are being marginalized, otherized and attacked precisely because they are not racist. This is easily proven by simple logic. If whites were racist, they wouldn't be in this position in the first place.

Almost, but not quite. 'Taken' is an actual movie with a coherent inciting action, rising action, conclusion, etc.

This was more like an angry letter to the editors that was just a middle finger drawn onto the page.

I'd watch 'Taken' again for fun on any lazy Sunday afternoon - I wouldn't recommend 'Citizen Vigilante' to anyone who wasn't already interested in it as an anthropological exhibit

Back in those days, one either called Mr. Moviefone for showtimes - please say the name of the movie you’d like to see, now - or just took pot luck when showing up.

Wow, I never knew that Moviefone had gotten voice detection. Back in my days, it asked you to punch in the name, and presumably the Moviefone database had mappings of the first few digits that corresponded to letters of the common movies out at the time.

I recall Uwe Boll being a somewhat household name among gaming nerds in the 2000s due to him directing a number of video game adaptations, including House of the Dead, Bloodrayne, Alone in the Dark, and even Far Cry. By all accounts, all of these films were incredibly awful (I never watched any), and he was reportedly barely more than a scammer who took advantage of Germany's laws around tax breaks around filmmaking or something to earn a living while pumping these out. He also famously challenged negative critics of his films to boxing matches, at least one of which actually happened. I don't remember the results, but I recall watching some grainy footage of the fight.

Culturally, it seems pretty clear that right-wing media is the subversive, rebellious one right now, even moreso in the filmmaking industry. Given that, it's perhaps unsurprising that what seems like such overt right-wing propaganda is made by someone who's generally been rejected (for quality, rather than any political reasons) by the industry like Uwe Boll. The western film by Ben Shapiro's company which starred Gina Carano, who was kicked off of Star Wars over some, IIRC, right-wing tweets, also come to mind. Thing is, with AI, the costs of producing films is going down very quickly, and so I have to imagine it's only a matter of time before a lot more films with this kind of messaging and this level of production value come out. With that democratization, it won't just be right-wing but all kinds of propagandistic Hollywood-level feature films that will likely come out from all over the spectrum. Should be exciting to see which ones end up winning out, if any.

There's the whole distribution-control as well, of course. Democratic governments have been locking down the Internet more and more, so maybe we're in for ideological filtering of feature films via distribution in the future that's just as strong as it is now via production. I'd hope that Twitter can act as a release valve, as well as torrents, but the latter are too niche, and the former can be censored or brought to heel if governments are motivated enough.

This led me down an interesting rabbit hole as to how this guy keeps making movies if he's so bad. Apparently in his early career the tax and subsidy combinations offered by the german government were so substantial films could be major flops and still be financial successes. He claimed subsidies were often as much as 50% of production costs and any losses were full tax writeoffs, so it was at worst basically a risk free investment. Meanwhile his 'more successful' films that actually broke even at the box office would sometimes sell 3-4x their total box office run in home video sales, House of the Dead alone is likely more than half of the money his films have ever made. A lot of this information eventually sources back to the man himself though (After laundering through interview -> wikipedia), so possibly worth taking with a grain of salt.

I don't know if this is an argument for or against government subsidies.

Unless he's of the Tommy Wiseau school of inexplicable unrelated fortune it does feel like a more plausible explanation than anything

Wait Uwe Boll made a passably watchable movie? Someone warn the airports that pigs are likely to be a takeoff and landing hazard! I don't think I'd have ever expected that to be possible!

Yes, this is the most newsworthy thing of it all.

I slightly object to Armie Hammer as being described as someone who got cancelled for being "MeToo'd". If I remember right a bunch of texts got leaked where he talked about wanting to eat a girl, not just cunnilingus, but cannibalism.

I'd say he had a very weird kink, and it got aired to everyone. His former roles were perfect looking bland white guys, and that leak ruined that type of role for him.

His family is also apparently very weird, and so some of that got aired out during this as well.

Free speech is a pressure valve. The more open the speech the faster that pressure dissipates.

Too many leaders in the West seem to want to emulate China, Russia, and the middle eastern censorship regimes without copying the most important aspect of those systems: they kill or imprison the dissenters for life. When you silence someone they don't go away. They are still there, but now even more angry that they have been silenced, and more certain that they are right. Do this to enough people and those people can build a coalition together purely on the energy of "we hate you". I think this is what helped Trump win both times.

Its silly to ban a mediocre movie by a terrible director starring a celebrity with a cannibalism fetish. The aspects of the movie itself are enough to tank to it as a piece of effective propaganda. The only thing it has going for it is the censorship.

Can't find the citation because it was video but I did see a Critical Drinker video recently where one of the plugged into Hollywood guys was implying that something about the Hammer accusations was bullshit and that he might have gotten looped into the #MeToo hysteria.

The whole cannabalism thing seems to be a bad look but at least one person with privileged knowledge (although not un unbiased narrator) is questioning the narrative.

Post still filtered at this time so not sure of the context.

the top level is filtered.

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