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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 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.
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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