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Notes -
Imagine the following hypothetical movie:
The protagonist is a middle aged white divorcee, whose ex-wife has unjustly poisoned his daughter against him, leaving him with very little to live for. He is very bitter about the state of the modern world, and believes America has gone down the tubes. Finally, he snaps, and with the help of a female accomplice, goes on a cross-country Natural Born Killers type murder spree, mowing down all the people he blames for the deterioration of society. And it's not a dark Oscar bait psychological drama, it's a light-hearted comedy that encourages the audience to cheer on the bloodshed.
First of all, such a movie would almost certainly never be made. Second of all, if by some miracle it was, it would be abundantly clear to everyone that it was shamelessly partisan wish-fulfillment produced by particularly bitter, particularly edgy right-wingers.
In fact, such a movie does exist. It's called God Bless America and it came out in 2011. But no one who saw it when it came out would have mistaken it for a right-wing manifesto; just the opposite, the Bush-era liberalism of the film's creators is so unabashedly on display that it feels like a screed from the other side.
I saw this movie back then when I was in middle school. Most of the politics went over my head, and I enjoyed it on the level that most teenage boys enjoy movies where a lot of people get shot. I rewatched it recently and found it fascinating what a political time capsule it is.
The protagonist, Frank, is exactly as I've described him above. While "middle-aged white man who thinks America sucks now" is a wholly and purely conservative caricature in 2023, the film is almost totally on his side. In the opening scenes, before Frank embarks on his killing spree, he gets to deliver a few author-insert monologues about how society has gone to hell. This scene is pretty interesting. "What happened to America?" is firmly right-coded, but the things Frank is angry about in particular are things that 2000s liberals didn't like. He's ranting about the vulgarity of "gay-bashing" and "xenophobic" radio shock jocks, which he views as emblematic of the decline.
What finally sets him off, is he gets a terminal cancer diagnosis. Since his life already sucks in every other way, he decides to commit suicide, but while he's about to shoot himself in front of his TV, one of those "Sweet 16" reality shows that were big a few years ago comes on, and he finds Chloe, the bratty, spoiled star so annoying that he decides to kill her first. So he tracks her down to her school and murders her, and then goes back home to commit suicide.
However, one of Chloe's classmates, Roxy, who also hated Chloe, witnesses the murder. She follows Frank home and ultimately convinces him that there are so many more people who need to die. So together they embark on their killing spree.
Not all of Roxy and Frank's targets are political (for example, people who won't shut up at the movies, and inconsiderate drivers), but filmmakers' politics come through pretty clearly when they mow down thinly-veiled stand-ins of the Westboro Baptist Church and a thinly-veiled stand-in for Limbaugh/Hannity type conservative commentators.. In the finale, they go down in a blaze of glory while shooting up a thinly-veiled 'American Idol' stand-in show.
This wasn't a monster hit or anything, and as far as I know it got pretty mixed reviews when it came out. But I think it's sort of fascinating in that filmmakers with the same politics, apparently mainstream US liberal, would never make a movie like this today.
The basic premise of likable spree shooters you're supposed to root just wouldn't fly now for one. Which is interesting on its own. Mass shooters have been present in the national consciousness for decades, but this sort of plot feels more taboo than it would have been even a decade ago. Nowadays "spree-shooter" is more likely to suggest in the popular imagination a political extremist, while back then it was more something that people just did because they were nuts or because they had personal grievances at work or school.
Frank's murderous hatred of modern American society and longing for the good old days, even if the specific things he calls out are things liberals think are bad, is much more firmly right-coded now. And some of the specifics, such as railing about consumerism and the shallowness of modern entertainment, have also become more common on the right over the past couple of years.
When Frank kills Chloe, we're supposed to get some cathartic enjoyment out of it, because who doesn't hate reality TV stars? Nowadays with sexual harassment having so much more salience in political discourse, I doubt any director would film a scene where a middle-aged man murders a teenage girl because she's just so vapid and annoying, and portray him as the good guy in the situation.
There are a bunch of jokes through the movie about how Roxy and Frank are totally not fucking, which would be unlikely now for the very same reason.
Watching this movie in the 2020s is a very bizarre experience for me. It was like a time machine. I don't have any more conclusions to draw from this, just that it's interesting how strongly art can reflect culture, and how strange those reflections can look a few years down the line.
I meant to reply to this weeks ago, but I forgot. I just abandoned the bookmark. Well, better late than never.
I haven't seen God Bless America, but based on your description, the characters are meant to be relatable, not sympathetic. You're right that their grievances are meant to be shared by the audience, but we're not supposed to feel cathartic bliss when they take out our perceived enemies. We're supposed to feel discomfort that someone like us could be driven by their animosity, an animosity we also feel, to become something so much worse than what we are. This is how villain protagonists usually work. The tone could be dramatic, like Sweeney Todd, or comedic, like Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, but the protagonist is not supposed to be admirable in these stories.
OR SO I THOUGHT.
That was what I used to think, before the surge in political violence that happened in 2017. Now, I think what I just said only applies to stories without any politically loaded imagery.
For example, in the first season of Rick and Morty (which aired in 2014), Rick and Summer beat up a Neo-Nazi, a member of the Westboro Baptist Church, and a guy who lets his dog defecate on neighbors' lawns. At the time, I thought the joke was that Rick, who's a bad person, was using violence to deal with petty grievances and encouraging his granddaughter to do the same. Then I saw a photo where an artist who works on the show wearing a "Fuck Racism, Punch Nazis" shirt (with a picture of Richard Spencer being punched) eating chicken nuggets (dipped in Schezuan sauce) with Dan Harmon and other members of the crew. Now I do wonder how much actual media that encourages violence gets made and isn't just hallucinated by ye olde soccer moms.
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This is an old airport thriller trope. Lee Child made a career out of it.
Hardcore right-wing revenge thriller, lots of violence, guns, bad guys getting murdered etc. But make the bad guys right-wing in some way, evil capitalists, militia members, cultists, mormons, rogue military.
The version of this that finally broke me was the second season of Amazon's Jack Ryan. The entire season revolves around Jack single-handedly toppling the government of Venezuela, but because this is 2019 Hollywood, the villain obviously couldn't be a stand-in for every American leftist's favorite dictator. So they replaced Chavez/Maduro with a right-wing populist Bolsonaro-type figure clearly intended to evoke Trump, and made the opposition leader who teams up with Jack a female, indigenous, teacher/activist with heavily implied (perhaps later outright stated - I never finished the show) socialist politics.
It's a 1980s red meat conservative fantasy about an American CIA operative cracking South American skulls in the name of Democracy, only with the politics awkwardly jumbled around to appeal to modern Democrats.
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I think this is because society is way more political in recent years, and we identify ourselves by political labels. Crazy people can follow trends like anyone else, and post-2014, that means obnoxiously proclaiming yourself a Nazi/communist before mass murdering your coworkers for something or other.
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A few years ago I finally got around to watching Falling Down, because I'd heard it was funny, disturbing and thought-provoking; and also because Michael Douglas always has a magnetic screen presence even in bad films (e.g. Basic Instinct and Wall St. Yes, the original Wall St., not the sequel with Shia LaBeouf. Fight me.).
Falling Down, huh. What a weird, insipid and unfunny movie. There's this spree killer who, after years of petty frustrations and disappointments, has snapped, gone postal and is plotting to murder his estranged wife, right? How do we get the audience to identify with him? Why, we'll just have him spout inane observational humour about the petty irritations of modern life in between vicious indiscriminate violence. "What's the deal with fast food chains, amirite guys?" This inane observational humour is never funny, never feels remotely in-character and essentially just feels like it's there to pad out the runtime, but - well, how else are we going to get the audience to sympathize with such an unpleasant character? What, explain his situation and motivations to such a degree that we can understand them even if we don't think his behaviour is justified? Bro, I'm a screenwriter, I'm not Cormac McCarthy.
The thriller parts aren't thrilling, the comedy parts aren't funny, the "satire" falls flat on its face, the plot and how it's depicted is so exaggerated, cartoonish and contrived that you could practically call it a preemptive adaptation of Grand Theft Auto V. Baffling how the filmmakers thought they were making some kind of profound statement about American society, masculinity, consumerism, whiteness etc. Even more baffling how so many critics apparently bought it.
I thought the exact opposite. The protagonist only killed the nazi guy on purpose, and accidentally killed the golfer. You seriously think he was planning to murder his wife? He had no plan; the ending is basically the dog who caught the car. The guy is just a regular guy who lost everything, his job, wife, house, daughter, and everything he might have worked for in his life. When he snaps, he says exactly what he wants: "I'm going home." He's lost everything and wants to cling desperately to the only thing he knows as happiness.
The petty annoyances aren't about the annoyances, but only an emphasis that the protagonist truly has nothing - that not even a single person in the entire city gives a damn about his existence or circumstances, and won't give him an inch of accommodation or an ounce of sympathy. When you have a place in society, the system working as intended is somehow comforting, even the little annoyances. But when you have no place, they just deepen the wound.
The movie isn't a commentary on society or anything, but a story of the protagonist's downfall. He was a regular guy, with a professional job and a family, just like you once, who lost his place. Even as a violent maniac, nobody gives a shit and he's just a piece of trash to be taken out.
Absolutely. He has a severe temper and the reason she left him was because she couldn't tolerate his emotional abuse and the implied threat of violence. The whole movie is him lashing out at the world that denied him the things he felt entitled to (good job, respect). Of course he's going to lash out at the woman who (as he sees it) denied him a stable family. The fact that he abducts the wife and daughter at gunpoint only demonstrates my point.
Its social commentary may not have succeeded, but it was certainly intended. Quote Wikipedia:
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Falling Down is a product of it's time. The kind of observational humor was novel, at that time.
It's been a while, the scene where he's complaining about fast food came at a time when fast food kind of changed (national brands and that kind of advertising were new, etc.). The violence was also (sort of) real; Which was in stark contrast to most action movies at the time...
It was before my time but globalization was kind of new and that type of Regan consumerism was strong back then.
Have you ever seen the movie Gung Ho? It's a comedy but it's cultural context, if that makes any sense.
Uh-huh. Bonus points for the top comment making the exact same GTA comparison I did.
Even Die Hard felt more grounded and believable than this. McClane is a bloody battered wreck by the end of his ordeal, while D-FENS hasn't a scratch on him until he actually gets brought down. And McClane is a cop who deals with hardened criminals every day, while D-FENS is an office drone who's never seen combat, and yet effortlessly mows down Compton gangbangers without a second's hesitation. Whatever Falling Down is, it's not "realistic". I don't even think it was really trying to be.
No I haven't. Does it have a similar plot?
Are you really going to ignore the rest of the sentence?
Right, and I contrasted it with an action movie which came out 5 years earlier which was, to my mind, far more grounded and realistic in its presentation. Likewise The Fugitive, which came out the same year.
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From what I’ve heard of the martial capabilities of gangbangers, this may be the least unrealistic part of a white collar office drone resorting to violence- it seems like an average 100+ IQ person less than 30 pounds overweight can significantly outperform even relatively hardened and experienced violent criminals by watching enough YouTube videos to avoid stupid mistakes and going to the range once or twice.
Sure, but YouTube didn't exist in 1993, and I don't think we're given any reason to believe that D-FENS has had any shooting practice prior to his rampage.
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This isn't a great example; reality is just weird. Socially, muggers often expect victims to follow a script (for good reason! victims are almost never carrying anything worth enough to risk their lives to try and keep it!) and whenever someone doesn't follow the script it can leave assailants completely non-plussed. So, "when mugging a Dilbert-lookalike, pulling one knife is enough" isn't too unrealistic a mugging plan. Physically, many fights really are essentially over in seconds, because humans are squishy and weak and just one deep cut or bad impact can be quickly incapacitating. So when "Dilbert" gets in the first hit with an unexpected baseball bat to the skull, "run" isn't too unrealistic a plan B.
Yeah, the rocket launcher from a random military surplus store (and the random little boy who knows how to use it!) was a much better example of this. Not impossible; "gang bust seizes rocket launcher" seems to be a headline every few years, including in LA. But clearly this one existed in the service of plot escalation rather than plot consistency.
An office drone with no combat training managing to overcome a mugger or muggers through quick thinking and a stroke of good luck? I can swallow that.
But the same man then
over the course of a few hours, all without being injured in any way or intercepted by the police (despite making no effort to hide his appearance and exposing his face to dozens if not hundreds of eyewitnesses). Part of the reason he fails to get intercepted by the police is because he just so happened to walk into a military surplus store owned by a man who has heard about his exploits on the radio and arrived at the erroneous conclusion that the man's exploits were motivated by racial hatred, and hence decided to protect the man from the police even if doing so made him an accessory after the fact.
No part of this plot passes the smell test.
Individual parts do, but not together. That's my main objection to Falling Down - even at his most restrained and grounded, Joel Schumacher is still too over the top to make a believable film for me. That he went on to make Batman Forever and Batman and Robin should have surprised nobody.
I'll admit that Phone Booth is something of a guilty pleasure, in large part because I saw it when I was 11 or 12 and watching it feels nostalgic. The plot is rather contrived (even more so than Falling Down, arguably), but it has no pretensions to social commentary, the dialogue is funny, the real-time splitscreen gimmick is well-executed, the acting is solid across the board (pretty impressive that Kiefer Sutherland has to more or less carry the movie by himself without appearing onscreen for 90 minutes, and he pulls it off) and the pace never flags.
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It's a dumb romp, and has a cult following in certain online circles (*chans, in particular). However, I found it to be a contrived sort of controlled venting for the audience the scriptwriters anxiously worried they might attract - who are allowed to feel anger at petty frustrations and disappointments, as you say, and vicariously enjoy and empathize with the aimless retaliatory spree killing, but must be made to stop short where the film draws a very firm boundary fencing in that anger as illustrated in the Army Navy store scene, when Michael Douglas' character pushes back against its truly radical (and bigoted) owner, stating "I'm an American, you're a sick asshole."
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I watched Idiocracy (2006) recently and had a similar experience. Sure, it takes hard swipes at Bush-era conservatives, but the fundamental premise is about how intelligence is heritable (this is, in fact, just assumed without discussion) and how educated populations aren't having kids.
Also Team America World Police hit differently in a 2023 in which opinion seems to have swung back towards "actually, some intervention might, hypothetically, be for good" with wars of violent conquest ongoing in Europe and potentially elsewhere.
I wouldn’t call Idiocracy particularly conservative for that reason because the mainstream right doesn’t particularly believe in the hereditability of IQ either, that’s extremely online DR types.
The mainstream right absolutely believes in the heritability of IQ, they just don't think about it much and don't believe in group differences. I think in fact almost all normies (mainstream left or mainstream right) believe in the heritability of intelligence, in that they'll predict that smart parents will have smart kids and dumb parents dumb ones, but when you make it explicit those on the left go into social respectability mode.
I have read this take so many times on this forum and every time I read it I feel like I'm living in the twilight zone. Where did you grow up?? I grew up in the midwest in a non major city and group differences were so obvious and apparent and openly talked about my entire life that I don't understand how you think half the country doesn't believe in them. The mainstream right absolutely believes that group differences exist, I would estimate that the most mainstream portion of them believe that the differences shouldn't matter and we should try to broadly accept the differences if not correct for them, and the bulk of the rest believe that the differences shouldn't matter, but do, and that trying to do anything to correct it is a fool's errand at best and a recipe for harrison bergeron style dystopia at worst. I don't think this is an extreme online position at all, I can imagine anyone in my grandfather's generation saying it implicitly to friends and family and anyone in my father's generation understanding it but perhaps not saying it.
Note by group differences I'm talking about innate differences in intelligence here. I think the mainstream right (and much of the normie left, though they'd never admit it) believes in behavioral group differences. And certainly my grandfather believed in group differences in all sorts of thing (and not just for blacks) and would tell you about them -- but he represents the mainstream right only in as much as he passed away some time ago.
I think everyone knows about innate differences in intelligence. Growing up everyone knew advanced classes in school are mostly white and Asian and very few blacks. The school I went to in the suburbs had few blacks and none of them were in advanced classes while all the Asian kids were. I can guarantee you I'm not the only person who noticed this, even in elementary school I think everyone knew that Asians are smarter and blacks are less smart. If you think no one has this figured out I don't know what to tell you.
Yeah it always shocks me how many people seem to sincerely believe in blank slateism despite 1. Recognizing heredity in individual families and 2. Noticing racial stereotypes being so evidently true in real life. When I was a kid and all the adults said that the reason Asians were smart and blacks weren’t as smart was “poverty” or whatever I always assumed it was just being polite. Like it registered the same to me as when little league coaches would tell kids they were batting last to “balance the lineup” or something. I always just assumed everyone privately believed in innate group differences but didn’t like talking about it, but tons of people insist it’s a crazy idea even on anonymous forums so I tend to believe they sincerely think that
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Leftists think that's because of historical oppression, many boomercons think it's because of cultural difference in worth ethic. I have trouble believing the sincerity of the position that there are no meaningful differences in average cognitive ability, but people certainly insist that it's what they believe.
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That stuff is really just there for color and, in some cases, to illustrate the degree of mental breakdown D-FENS has had. He's got through the motions of a typical salaryman but has lost the filter that moderates normal human interaction. The movie is not a romp, but has something to say about the ruin of the domesticated man who, following all the rules and doing what they are "supposed" to, nevertheless discovers they were never more than a resource to be used up and discarded when no longer an economic benefit to their employer, the government, and even their family. It's a tragedy of a man who decides on suicide but grabs some wish fulfillment on the way out. Notably he only kills bad guys who try to kill him first. The violence is definitely not indiscriminate.
I think you may have meant to reply to my comment rather than /u/VoxelVexillologist's.
Nope. He fires at two guys in a golf cart, one of whom has a heart attack from the stress, and gloats at him while he's (presumably) dying.
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As a number of people have pointed out over the years, Mike Judge (the director and co-writer of Idiocracy) seems to have some conservative sympathies. For example, Hank Hill in King of the Hill is a fairly sympathetic portrayal of a conservative suburban Texan and the liberal people in Beavis and Butthead are not exactly always portrayed as admirable.
Is this a bad thing?
King of the Hill was, for it's time, rather progressive. Sure, it made fun of liberals but look at Dale Gribble... Tell me that's a positive characterization.
It's weird that any empathy towards the right or jokes toward the left get someone labeled.
Did I say it was a bad thing? I was simply responding to someone upthread who seemed surprised that a movie like Idiocracy could be the product of liberal culture despite seeming conservative in some ways. It's not surprising since the creator has some conservative sympathies.
My view, in case you are curious, is that it's good to have people of a variety of political and cultural perspectives, including conservatives, making art and entertainment and also I enjoy King of the Hill.
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Dale Gribble is definitely a positive portrayal of that kind of character. Especially, considering every character is flawed. Just look at the subreddit. They love Dale.
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Recently I listened to this song (which slaps): https://youtube.com/watch?v=wYsMjEeEg4g
"Only stupid people are breeding" is one of those Redditor lines that you can only get away with if you make it very clear that you're referring to dumb MAGA hat-wearing, moonshine-drinking sister-fucking rednecks from Alabama. Any suggestion that the observation might be true, and apply just as much to, say, Pakistani immigrants to the UK practising cousin marriage for five consecutive generations, will get you slapped with "umm that's so racist and eugenicist".
For posterity though, that song is mocking the singer as well as the culture he was singing about.
I understand that the song is intended to be a misanthropic rant from the perspective of an unlikeable character.
It's just interesting to me that you can get away with portraying a character who hates humanity as a whole (including black people, Pakistanis, Arabs etc.), but not with a character who hates a specific subset of humanity.
It's like announcing that you hate chocolate, but getting angry and defensive when someone asks you if you hate white chocolate (which you must, as "white chocolate" is a subset of "chocolate").
Effectiveness differences. Misanthropes mostly sit in empty apartments and whine, racists have had major impacts on human lives.
Anti-white racists (who aren't considered racist), yes. But do pro-white racists have a major impact?
Ummm, yes, historically speaking they have on a very good many occasions.
"Historically". This ain't the 50's.
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The fundamental premise in Idiocracy is not going against the grain of lib/left/progressives directly since it doesn't note race or group differences. It's the typical sort of 'dirtbag left bernie bro' nihilism: 'The world is getting dumber bro'. You're just expected to not think about it too hard or derive any logical conclusions from it. But I agree that if you do that, you do end up with some problematic conclusions.
As for Team America, if I remember correctly the message of the movie was the typical centrist libertarianism from Matt and Trey. Where they don't have much to say other than pointing out the political dialectic in the US and celebrating it. As in, there are good jews on both sides. So lets laugh together as we destroy a common enemy in the middle east.
But... the big enemy in Team America was North Korea, and did they even mention Jews at any part of the movie?
I'd say that Team America was, in the end, a right-wing movie about how Bush Did Nothing Wrong (sure, some right-wingers have created a mostly after-the-fact narrative about how Bush wasn't really a right-winger and War in Iraq was a liberal war or something - that's certainly not how it appeared at the time, with almost the entire American right in lockstep with the administration, or so it certainly seemed on Internet forums). Team America's carnage at the start of the movie was portrayed mostly as comedic (ha-ha, look at the French getting their just desserts for not going along in Bush's grand adventure!), the mocked actual celebrities were liberals who were literally and repeatedly called fags, and the most memorable actual statement was the "Pussies, dicks and assholes" speech about how you sometimes just have to be an asshole to stop the bad guys.
Close, but it was actually about how pussies needs dicks to fuck assholes or else asshole will shit all over the pussies.
Yes, I didn't bother googling the exact formulation of the pussies/dicks/assholes speech. However, the general interpretation of the message was as I described.
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The big enemy is a North Korean piñata. If you hit it enough times with a stick a bunch of justifications for the war on terror fall out.
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Sure, but they're not entirely wrong either. Left wingers did go on to endorse practically everything they protested about Bush, from foreign wars to mass surveillance. People opposed to it are basically extinct.
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The thing about Idiocracy is that almost everyone is white or Hispanic, because they are almost all descendants of that one dude and his bitches.
Isn’t their president black?
President Camacho codes as both black and Hispanic to me, but I am not American so I would defer to someone who is.
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Aren't Bernie bro people even dirtbag ones being much further to the left than film, more likely to point out classicism of the movie and its eugenics endorsement(like they already did many times on YouTube)? Specifically labeling poor whites as breeding morons is much more general liberal democrat or "shitlib" thing to say.
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Did we watch the same movie?
Maybe? https://youtube.com/watch?v=_4l5J4V733E
The ending seems pretty clear to me: 'Sure, the US has blundered a fair bit. But there are real baddies out there and if the US won't do what needs to be done no one will.'
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It all depends on the framing. Like I said, you can derive some problematic conclusions from recognizing general intelligence, but what if you just don't ever recognize those? To quote Eric Turkheimer:
A universal truth like 'we are all getting dumber' is not ugly. Though it's not far from it depending on how you look at it.
On the other hand I don't disagree that lib/left/progressives tie themselves to a whole host of nonsense and woo to get closer to universal truths they find beautiful. Like, as you point out, Howard Gardner and his theory of multiple intelligences. And that they flatly deny IQ research and otherwise slander IQ researchers as being dogmatic racists. But you won't find these same people balking away from the idea of complimenting someone on how smart they are.
Telling someone they are smart is beautiful, telling someone they are dumb is ugly. Just live in the emotional moment and float from one to another and don't think about any uncomfortable conclusions you could possibly derive from anything. Cognitive dissonance is hard, after all.
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