• Bob [he/him,he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    I don't know what "talking points" means here, but if you mean a movie with a leftist ideology that's also a war movie you're gonna be hard pressed to find one for the reason Zizek points out which is that almost every single movie about war that follows the "war is hell" model just turns into covert valorization, even movies like Full Metal Jacket. There's also the problem that movies make their protagonists the only "people" involved (because that's how stories work) and if your protagonists and antagonists are all military people then inherent to that is a sort of dehumanization of civilians. At this point the only way to get around that is to have a movie where your noncivilian protagonists are literally revolutionaries or defenders against imperial aggression, and the only type of movie where that's allowed is so abstracted from reality that no one understands it as that anyway. E.g, Star Wars is obviously about Vietnam but it's not that obvious to everyone or hardly anyone. Another example is Starship Troopers but that's not only abstracted into fantasy, but it's also a satire so there's two layers preventing it from actually reaching people that way. Probably the worst offender I've ever seen from popular cinema is Saving Private Ryan.

    Honestly your best bet is just ditching war movies, at least ones made in the west (there's some classic Soviet war films you might like, like Fall of Berlin). The best leftist movies are all gonna be from the 70s (with rare exception 80s) and they're all gonna be shit like They Live. The ones that still remain are arthouse or horror and those just aren't very popular.