The Guardian: Frank Miller and the rise of cryptofascist Hollywood

[Lost-in-FL]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/nov/24/frank-miller-hollywood-fascism

:wow:

...And yet with action films, the moral and political ideas in play are surpassingly easy to spot. What about the entertainment films that came later, during the era of CGI – the big-budget films primarily generated from more imaginary fare, such as the apparently numberless comic book franchises of Batman, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Daredevil, Fantastic Four, X-Men, Captain America, et al? In these cases, the moral framework of the product is just as simplistic as in action films, if not more so, and the triumph of the social order is just as violent, and just as relentless, though the films are couched in a sugary glaze of graphics and "wow" moments that distract from ideological branding. The CGI sheen is seductive enough that it's sometimes difficult to divine the message at first. You are too busy being bludgeoned by the sounds and lights. Nevertheless, the message is there. Might is right, the global economy will be restored, America is exceptional, homely people deserve political disenfranchisement, and so on. It bears mentioning that these are films that are in many cases being marketed to children. When I was a kid, you could not gain admission to a film such as Dirty Harry or The French Connection. But an American adolescent can now see Batman in The Dark Knight, rated PG-13, without much difficulty.

The film 300, directed by Zack Snyder, based on a Frank Miller graphic novel of the same name, is just what you would expect from the heavily freighted right-wing filmic propaganda of the post-9/11 period: the Greeks, from which our own putative democracies are descended, must fight to the death against a vast but incompetent army of Persians (those hordes of the Middle East), who are considered here unworthy of characterisation – in fact, every character in the film is unworthy of characterisation – and the noble Spartans (the Greeks in question) achieve heroism despite their glorious deaths on the field at Thermopylae, by virtue of the moral superiority of their belief system and their unmatched courage. Ruthless enemy! From the Middle East! Heroic, rugged individualists! A big, sentimental score! Lots and lots of blue-screen! Endless amounts of body parts spewing theatrical blood!

It's a barely watchable film, but what from Hollywood these days is not similarly unwatchable, when so many high-profile releases are based on a medium, the comic book, made expressly to engage the attentions of pre- and just post-pubescent boys. At least comic books themselves are so politically dim-witted, so pie-in-the-sky idealistic as to be hard to take seriously. But in the films of this era, the Marvel and DC era of Hollywood, even when the work is not self-evidently shilling for large corporations (with product placement) or militating for a libertarian and oligarchical political status quo (which makes a fine environment for large, multinational corporations), the work is doing nothing at all to oppose these things. Paying your $12.50, these days, is not unlike doing a few lines of cocaine and pretending you don't know about the headless bodies in Juarez.

With this in mind, an honest recognition of cinematic propaganda, we shouldn't be shocked by Frank Miller's comments about Occupy Wall Street. It is naive to be shocked by them. But let's evaluate the particulars of his remarks just the same. Miller tries to repel the OWS message ("Maybe, between bouts of self-pity and all the other tasty titbits of narcissism you've been served up in your sheltered, comfy little worlds, you've heard terms like al-Qaeda and Islamicism") by reminding us that we are at war. This despite the fact that OWS is focused primarily on income inequality, and thus mainly taken up with domestic politics, such that OWS doesn't really take a position on the "ruthless enemy" and doesn't need to. Miller's particular approach, the warmongering approach, is self-evidently reminiscent of the Bush/Cheney years, in which any domestic reversal was followed by an elevated level on the colour-coded risk-assessment wheel. But in this post-Iraq war moment – when the most aggravated conspiracies we seem to have in New York City involve, for example, a lone Dominican guy who advertises his hatred of the government on Facebook and who may have been entrapped by local police – our "ruthless enemy" just doesn't seem quite as numerous as Miller's Persian hordes….