I don't think mainstream or maybe film in general has the language to do satire in the way people would find effective. Like with fight club you can talk about the subtext of it but it's overwhelmingly still cool sexy people doing interesting things. The people who look at it on that level aren't really missing the point, they are grasping what most of film making is designed to do. All of things that we think about as making a good movie are things that elevate whatever you are portraying.
It's just kind of insane to be like "We cast these super attractive people, we made them more attractive with makeup and costumes, we lit everything to make it nicer, we tried to make the dialogue as well paced and engaging as possible, we tried to make every shot beautiful, but oh yeah you are not supposed to feel positive in that audience seat. This movie is about how all these things we made beautiful and entertaining are bad."
This is why anti-heroes never work in movies, they always become straight forward heroes in the audience's mind irrespective of the filmmakers' intentions. At the same time films have such a powerfully hypnotic and visceral effect that you could get an absolutely bone-chilling depiction of capitalist horrors up there on the screen that could have a profound impact. To my mind no one has explicitly tried though, except for maybe Aronofsky with "Mother!". Although even then it's about humans treating nature in general rather than exploitative hierarchy systems in particular. Maybe "99 francs", though again that one is more focused on the ills of the advertising industry.
One of my favorite book series is The First Law by Joe Abercrombie. It's a fantasy book, not high literature or anything, a subversion of classic Sword and Sorcery and also Epic Fantasy.
A big part of the reason I like this book series so much is that it starts out by introducing you to one of the main characters, this grizzled veteran. He talks a lot about doing things he regrets and trying to become a better person and, importantly, he leaves his homeland and goes to a different place. Sometimes we meet characters that knew him and they confirm he was hated and feared, but we don't get to see the wars he fought in or the scale of the evil he may of done. So we are kinda lead to assume he's just a soldier with a guilty conscience. Then, in the last book in the trilogy, he goes home again, and decides that trying to be a better person hasn't won him anything, and the reader is finally forced to see that this guy is exactly who he told you he was all along: a monster, with no conscience, no compunctions. It still falls into a thing where I love the violence, so I don't necessarily want this incredibly violent person to die because then the violence will be over, but at the same time he kills or hurts a number of characters I'd come to like over the course of the series, so it would be incredibly cathartic to see him get his just desserts.
The author goes on to repeat this trick in most of the books he's written, and fuck me I love it every time.
Also, in the film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (jesus christ, you're referencing Aronofsky and a motherfucking French film I've never even heard of and I'm talking about mainstream Fantasy and a goddamn Star Wars movie. I promise I've seen and read real art, but no fuck me pop stuff can be good too why am I self-conscious about liking what I like) there's that scene at the end where Darth Vader shows up and kills a bunch of nobody rebels and all the fans collectively orgasmed. And all I could think watching that scene was, if the movie had done it's job of building up interesting, relatable, likable characters and then this monster loomed out of the dark and murdered all of them it would be horrifying and grim and tragic.
That actually sounds like really good storytelling. I love it when books or films give you this very vague and subtle gut feeling of things going horribly wrong but you can't quite articulate how or why, or what it is even that feels off. A great example is how at least half the viewers could have sworn they saw the head in the box in Se7en but it was never shown. Hell I was pretty sure myself it was quasi-subliminaly flashed for a moment on the screen and had to go back and rewatch the ending.
Btw, I just remembered another title with explicitly anti-imperialist messaging that's pretty effective emotionally - Black Sails. It's a TV series rather than a movie but was no less cinematic than stuff made for the big screen. It's also the one and only serious no holds barred pirate "movie", despite the history of on-screen pirate renditions being as old as cinema itself.
I've been meaning to watch Black Sails for a while, pirates and naval stuff in general has always fascinated me since I was a kid and the first Pirates of the Caribbean came out.
I was talking with some friends about our favorite films this year, and I think mine has to be Uncut Gems. Just the sense of dread and anxiety that builds up through that film is crazy. I was having a particularly bad week when I went to see it in theaters, in the time before COVID, and I had an intense reaction, almost a anxiety attack watching the movie- and I'm normally a pretty calm person, I don't get anxiety attacks. I liked Sorry to Bother You, obviously Boots Riley has got good politics, but surrealism just never quite works for me. Living in the midst of capitalism is already so crazy, figures like Elon Musk or Jeffrey Epstein or Mark Zuckerberg are already so evil that turning them into over-the-top caricatures just dilutes the message for me. I feel bad because I didn't like Invisible Man for similar reasons, even though Ralph Ellison definitely had good politics, and both works are explicitly about black liberation, but for whatever reason surrealism just doesn't jive with me.
Exactly. If you frame it good, powerful, in control you do advocate for it, not against it.
As child I said, I'd rather be part of the empire, than the alliance cause the Empire is stronger and doesn't have to hide and hope their planets don't get blown up.
I’d rather be part of the empire, than the alliance cause the Empire is stronger and doesn’t have to hide and hope their planets don’t get blown up.
This is how libs see Capitalist countries vs Socialist countries
The weird thing about american psycho the film is that it's a parody of the book in a lot of ways. Bret easton ellis, from what I can gather, is a rich ivy league psycho who mostly wrote about his social circles. A lot of readers, self included, took his writing as deadpan satire but seems like that was giving him more credit than he deserves.
Starship troopers the movie is satire. The book, not so much.
read the book as a kid and thank god all I remember is haha space marine go booooom
Yeah that's my point. That's the case for Fight Club and apparently American Psycho as well.
It's still a bad b-movie that can only be read as satire if that's already a strong preconception you go in with. I bet most viewers took it at face value.
I missed the "fascism is bad" when I watched it as a teen but I definitely caught the "war is awful, done for awful reasons, and people die pointlessly and horribly" so I'd say at least some of the satire is evident in the film without the outside context.
EDIT: but yeah the "service guarantees citizenship" first part of the movie has a fair chance of flying over the heads of someone who goes in blind.
the anti-democracy speech by the teacher is messed up too
I got that it was satire when I was like 9. It's not that deep, so obvious.
As history shows it often is. So many good things were crushed by sheer brute force.
Yeah, spot on. Worth pointing out it's directed by a woman too
I have a friend from college who still, in 2020, tells me he's disappointed that Stephen Colbert turned out to be a lib and not more conservative.
I never knew his "right wing nutjob" parody character, but my boss told me he thought he was real too.
Considering how over the top it was, that is...remarkable.
Than again, I suppose it's also a solid attestation to how batshit insane many mainstream right wingers are, particularly these days.
Are we even sure that satire ever did what it was supposed to do? Does pretending to be a thing to point out its absurdity actually work on anyone who doesn't explicitly know/care about the intent? Or was satire always niche shitposting that only a few understood but most took at face value? And instead of huffing its own farts for being clever and subversive, should have noticed the writing on the wall a couple centuries ago?
"Americans don't get satire" is a thing I've heard a lot and I think it's true. This is part of the genius of paul verhoeven. He knows 99% of american viewers will not catch the satire, so he gives them a kick-ass action film that they can hoot and eat popcorn to. Very effective propoganda (the good kind) imo
How is it then functionally anything else but jingoistic pro-empire propaganda?
With verhoeven specifically, he was way ahead of his audience and his films have taken on more depth than people used to give them. I think most people understand his films as satire now. As far as I can see the only way to make a big budget hollywood movie that has anti police/ anti corporate themes (robocop) or anti imperialist themes (starship troopers) is to do it trojan horse style, packaged in a genre action film.
Yeah he always had subversive messaging in his work but at the same time just as you're saying he was known to the mainstream audience back in his heyday as a guy who does schlocky action flicks with loads of gory violence and explicit nudity, bordering on outright porn. I mean the main discourse around Basic Instinct was whether you can really see Sharon Stone's snatch for fucks sake. As a comparison, even if it's a merely ok movie (as opposed to brilliant) the issue of how they made the pencil disappear in The Dark Knight was way in the background.
I think you're correct.
Case in point -- every single reddit community that started out as satire has become 100% serious.
Malcom Gladwell has a good episode on how shit American satire is and Colbert Report in particular. I know Gladwell has tons of shit takes, but that was a good episode.
Noooooo the game is meant to show the horrors of overrun capitalism and nationalism
Haha Liberty Prime go brrrrr
My dad excitedly took me to see that Vice movie with Christian Bale as Cheney. Its pretty lib and they lay it on pretty thick with the whole "this man is a heartless monster" subtext. He even has this whole like villain monologue at the end of the film basically saying "there had to be a war." Walking back to the car my dad dead ass looks at me and says "he was right you know, there had to be a war."
I remember sitting in my parent's room one morning with them and they turned on a channel with some movie about GWB for a bit and it was this scene where Bush or someone is talking about how if they invade Iraq they will pin in Iran and something about oil and that always stuck with me for some reason even when I was kind of chuddy.
I think it's that way with alot of stuff, first you try and justify it to yourself and after awhile you can't, atleast that's what happened to me but I was a kid/teenager when I grappled with this stuff.
I’m on Season five of my first watch through. It’s an amazing show but Tony is so fucking frustrating. He can’t control his guys, he can’t control his anger, he can’t control any of his vices. And it always backfires on him. Truly a character you love to hate but hate to love.
I dunno, I feel like Come And See was pretty effective as an anti-war movie.
I saw it for the first time this year and laughed more than anything because I saw the same mockery described in the OP. Besides Fight Club (as alluded to in the post title), Nightcrawler is another movie I love that I'm pretty sure most miss the point. Jake Gyllenhaal isn't the hero, he is a complete teardown of dead-eyed "underdog" ruthless psychopath willing to do whatever it takes to compete for the "American Dream".
It's a great little film but I'm not sure if most people's takeaway from it is a condemnation of capitalism, rather than the cut-throat media industry. For leftists yeah sure the message is loud and clear, for "apoliticals" however...
A more explicit film to this effect might be "99 francs".
I wish to provide a hot take: With its focus as consumerism as the sole driving ill in society, I don't think Fight Club aged very well as a critique.
Another Fight Club hot take. It's not as much of a woke satire of toxic masculinity as people seem to think nowadays.
Watch "Dietland" then tell me in which ways your critique against Fight club work against that, too and where it differs. Also tell us why Dietland nearly gets out of lib territory over the course of the seasons.
(Like if you have nothing you'd rather do and are bored)
I read an interview the author of the book did and he emphasized it’s really just anti authority.
my hot take is that its a gay allegory in the same way that the matrix is a trans allegory (not intended to be but is anyway)
what do you mean? no one has ever incorrectly interpreted scathing satire to be a lauded goal everyone should strive towards! whaaat machiavelli nooo :shocked-pikachu:
I am very shocked to learn that capitalist media is bad at deprogramming people who have been brainwashed by capitalism.
The Ride of the Valkyries scene in Apocalypse Now is an accidental masterpiece of pro-American propaganda.
Whatever Coppola's intentions, he created a scene about the mighty and unstoppable American military effortlessly crushing any weaklings foolish enough to resist it.
FMJ has that scene where they're just shooting Vietnamese civilians from the helicopter and the intent is extraordinarily obvious but chuds quote it and misread it all the same
Seeing the movie and immediately wanting to make reservations at Dorsia.
there's a reason Twilight Zone was so explicit in the moral lessons - most viewers don't get subtext at all - if you want to make media with a message, you got to hit people over the head with it to have any chance of getting it across
aka death of the author is a real thing - so being obvious is much more effective generally
