WATCH, CELEBRATE, LOVE, LOATHE, DON’T ACT
A trend as of recent has been to ascribe to blockbuster films like Superman and One Battle After Another supposed radical political statements. Elated reviews proclaim that these movies manage to surpass some spectral, omnipresent filter of Hollywood executive censure on what can and cannot be said. Superman is supposedly a piece for Palestinian protest; One Battle After Another surreptitiously re-ignited a new generation of activism.
What seems absent from the discussion is results. Sure, these movies (and their ilk, like Barbie) have raised good, even worthwhile, points for discussion, but what comes out of the discussion?
The inundation of movies like these is not a recent phenomenon. Cinema has frequently been a site for depicting political ideas – for better and for worse – which tends to generate some discourse before subsequently fulfilling its cathartic function for mainstream audiences. Feelings of injustice and anger at the condition of women in patriarchal society are funneled through the story of Barbie and resolved neatly into empty satisfaction. A brief fad on TikTok using insert songs from the film accompanies this until the views stop coming. The central tendency of any good tragic play is to purge those negative feelings after the show ends.
New movies in this phenomenon, like Superman and Barbie, reveal this purging tendency far more clearly than before. Both additions are stripped of the provocative political sheen that surrounds Battleship Potemkin or The Battle of Algiers – in part because their politics don’t require an elaborate decoration.
More to the point – what dialogue did these movies generate and where did it go? The hopes that Superman might signal a shift in Hollywood has only begotten movies like The Voice of Hind Rajab which serve not to motivate an end to the genocide of Palestinians by Israel but rather to exploit and market their suffering.
The end of Superman, where the Justice Gang steps in and brings an end to the fictional conflict and slaughter of definitely-not-stand-ins, generated feelings of pride that the movie stood up and spoke what people were thinking. Now a film in Hollywood supported Palestine!
Superman’s thinly veiled interventionist aspirations and pitiful vague gestures to real world conflicts come to a head at the end of the film. In part the structure of typical feel-good, superhero action movies is to blame. The third act, at our hero’s most desperate struggle, resoundingly ends with satisfaction. The viewer’s emotions are charted along that same journey, those feelings of injustice seem to almost resolve themselves as easily as the Justice Gang arrived.
Barbie too allowed this same arc to play out. The dazzling world of Barbie is saved and there is complete equality between the Kens and Barbie, Margot Robbie chooses to face the real world as a real girl. I believe that it’s evident enough now that the discussion addressing the movie focused primarily on how women are treated in patriarchal society, yet it largely failed to motivate any positive material change. Seeing a fantastical image play out allowed for viewers to briefly escape real world injustices – which quickly return alongside an overt car commercial in the film. Barbie’s neoliberal feminist message slots in neatly there.
To cut down any desire to be politically motivated is part of the reason these movies exist – consciously or not. Movies are products. This is especially true of blockbuster cinema, made up of many corporate deals and tie-ins like action figures, collectible popcorn bowls, and memorabilia before the movie even hits the screen. Movies are dazzling, sometimes greatly moving and wonderful, products which more often than not are intent on selling you something. Barbie sells cars, Superman sells comics. Neither film promises change.
One Battle After Another doesn’t fare better. It sells an idea of a fantastical revolutionary movement. Leonardo DiCaprio (whose predilection for predatory behaviour and desire to buy up business in Tel Aviv should signal concern for most) fumblingly passes the torch to his daughter and the white-supremacist-cum-racial-fetishist (a redundant phrase I suppose) is quietly disposed of. The Christmas Adventurers Club, a stand-in for any number of white supremacist capitalist groups, still remains. Actual ICE raids and real white supremacists still remain. The hollowed-out barely begun movement by revolutionary groups in the 1960s still remains.
How far can a movie, or movies as a medium at all, push someone to action? I’d wager not far enough. These films are celebrational. Audiences celebrate their content as a daring political statement rather than tried and tested products crafted for appeal. It is celebratory politics, or in a more cynical manner, the aestheticization of politics.
These products that promote a fictional account of political action and change sell a cheap satisfaction that is quickly digested by online discourse, shortly before another Hollywood executive green-lights a sequel.
These representations mean nothing. They are vacant, hollowed out, unprovocative. They do not beget anything. Your film is not revolutionary in any sense if it’s written and produced by millionaires who are cosplaying the figure of down-to-earth every-man.
These movies are art in some way, but they lack the ability to motivate viewers into doing something. That is a charge against them. They are vapid.
