There’s an old Marxist-Leninist tweet from a gadfly who went by the name of Phil Greaves:
“Star Wars is fascist, Harry Potter is fascist neo-feudal dreck, selfie-obsession is fascist, British soap operas are fascist, sci-fi is generally fascist, ironic detachment is fascist, porn is fascist. Masscult under imperialism is inherently fascistic. Sorry to spoil your ‘fun’.”
And the mad lad who has since protected his tweets replied to himself soon after:
“One day people will ask: ‘How did Anglo-Americans not see their own fascism?’ And part of the answer will be: ‘Because they were entertained by it.’”
The point Greaves is getting at is how the current moment attempts to overwhelm you as an individual with spectacle at all times, and to hypnotize you in a way. It is easier for the state to alienate you and keep you locked into regular consumer behavior if you are watching ambivalently, without thinking, allowing yourself to be immersed in something whether it be the new Avatar film, alcohol or drug abuse, or porn addiction. Think about how the so-called algorithm induces schizophrenia in you as a subject. You first see a selfie from your friend back home for the holidays, and next, you see an ad for a political candidate paid by a subsidiary of AIPAC. Then you see from the news account of your choice Palestinian bodies mutilated by either our government’s or Israel’s. Then you see a meme that you have to Google in order to understand. In mere seconds, you have hopped around the world, and your attention has shifted again, again, and again.
The problem here is one of immersion. These media objects, whether we talk about the Marvel Cinematic Universe or virtually-augmented point-of-view porn, like cigarettes, come in regular enough doses to give you your fix, and yet something feels missing. Mark Fisher calls this condition “depressive hedonia.”
Here’s Fisher in chapter 4 of Capitalist Realism:
“Many of the teenage students I encountered seemed to be in a state of what I would call depressive hedonia. Depression is usually characterized as a state of anhedonia, but the condition I’m referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that ‘something is missing’ – but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle. In large part this is a consequence of students’ ambiguous structural position, stranded between their old role as subjects of disciplinary institutions and their new status as consumers of services. In his crucial essay ‘Postscript on Societies of Control’, Deleuze distinguishes between the disciplinary societies described by Foucault, which were organized around the enclosed spaces of the factory, the school and the prison, and the new control societies, in which all institutions are embedded in a dispersed corporation.”
Regarding that last line, in the new MCU film, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Zendaya’s character gets offered a good job, but she turns it down because it’s for an evil corporation. Her friend asks if all corporations are evil. She says “Yes.” In the context of the film, this is one of the things Peter Parker loves about her: her ethical moral compass. But in the reality the film exists in, this line is ironic by being a product of Disney, whose name is interestingly missing from both the front and end credits. Zendaya’s character’s refusing to work for a corporation is proven to be hypocritical, as the actress has chosen for the better part of a decade to work almost exclusively for them. And yet, when she kisses Tom Holland, her real-life boyfriend, the audience applauded nonetheless.
The Soviet film theorist Lev Kuleshov wrote in his landmark piece of film theory “The Principles of Montage”:
“The artist’s relationship to his surrounding reality, his view of the world, is not merely expressed in the entire process of shooting, but in the montage as well, in the capacity to see and to present the world around him. A variety of social encounters, a class struggle takes place in reality, and the artist’s existence within a particular social class influences his world-view. Artists with differing world-views each perceive the reality surrounding them differently; they see events differently, discuss them differently, show them, imagine them, and join them to another differently. Thus, film montage, as the entire work of filmmaking, is inextricably linked to the artist’s world-view and his ideological purpose.”
If we take this as true and look at the dominant mode of filmmaking in America and the West in the past 50 years since the end of New Hollywood with the release of Jaws and Star Wars (pick your poison), it’s obvious that the dominant mode of filmmaking has been immersion. When James Cameron’s Avatar was released and pushed forward the trend of 3D and fully digital spaces, the main point of praise was how ‘immersive’ it was. With Avatar: The Way of the Water, this was taken forward with new, technically difficult footage never before possible, both with underwater 3D footage requiring technological advancement allowing each piece of the human face to be recorded in a liquid environment where facial features are distorted.
Some left-wing filmmakers, like the undersung Paul W.S. Anderson, have attempted to work from within the system, creating movies with revolutionary politics like Resident Evil: Retribution, which features images like that of a private military group falling beneath the superstructure of an old Soviet base, being crushed by the very simulacra they used to poison the world. But Anderson, too, like Cameron, was victim to the desire to immerse the audience and give us our dopamine fixes. He even used technology from the state to lull audiences into a kind of stupor, turning shots meant to recall to the viewer the torture at the hands of the fascists in Salò, or 120 Days of Sodom into images meant to entertain the viewer. He used NASA cameras shooting upwards of 10,000 frames per second for very beautiful slow motion photography. There’s surely a joke to be made from the old Maoist Jean-Luc Godard’s line about cinema being the truth at 24 frames per second, updated to 10,000 lies per second through social-democrat Paul W.S. Anderson’s cinema.
There’s a bizarre video that came out in 2012 featuring Marxist filmmaker Michael Haneke and CIA plant John Krasinski in the Hollywood Reporter where Haneke explains how Spielberg’s Schindler’s List is an incredibly manipulative film because of how it turns the Holocaust into entertainment. We, the audience, begin to fear whether the characters will be gassed or not. The gas of Auschwitz is turned from a real historical object into a literary device, another example of Chekov’s gun. Haneke’s films, by contrast, are cold and impersonal. His first theatrical feature, The Seventh Continent, spends ten minutes following a family getting out of bed. We don’t see their faces, instead their feet as they tie their shoes and their hands as they eat. This is a Brechtian approach to filmmaking, meaning Haneke is using the distancing effect. He wants the audience to be at a remove from what he is presenting, and instead the audience thinks about it instead of being immersed in whatever world is being shown.
His films echo the words of the great Soviet filmmaker and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein, who wrote in “A Dialectical Approach to Film Form”:
“Step by step, by a process of comparing each new image with the common denotation, power is accumulated behind a process that can be formally identified with that of logical deduction. The decision to release these ideas, as well as the method used, is already intellectually conceived. The conventional descriptive form for film leads to the formal possibility of a kind of filmic reasoning. While the conventional film directs the emotions, this suggests an opportunity to encourage and direct the whole thought process as well.”
This is a mode of filmmaking that rejects emotional manipulation alone and instead wants the audience to deduce the logic of the material reality being presented. When you go to the movies, you interact with filmed reality. It’s ultimately a kind of materialistic art, when you look towards its essence. But in America, from the big studios down to micro-budget filmmakers here in Chicago, there is a push towards immersion. We filmmakers are entertained by the studios, and so we aspire to work for the studios, just as naïvely as the working man believes that one day he, too, will be a billionaire. Audience members broke box office records recently watching the new, fascist Spider-Man movie. What’s troubling is that there aren’t many alternatives. I Want Your Sex, from Queer New Wave icon Gregg Araki, demands an attention to the roles shown and the characters’ class relations, but its obvious ideology attacking hedonism appears to have been lost on the critical masses who praise it for its explicit sex scenes in a puritanical era. Yet the sex scenes and the context of the characters show that the puritanical approach is more ‘correct’ than the perspective espoused by Olivia Wilde, even though her words appear alluring. She roofies Cooper Hoffman’s character, explicitly grooms him, and abuses him. Somehow this is lost on many viewers.
When talking about contemporary socialist films, not a whole lot of names pop up here in the Americas. Boots Riley comes to mind immediately, but the question quickly arises if his filmmaking is even particularly socialist. His individual opinions are, yes, but the form of it all? Even if his characters in I Love Boosters end up cheering a general strike, the form of his film still relies on immersion. The film form is still capitalistic to the core, from its production model to how the movie moves from shot to shot, even if its main plot device is a dialectical materialism device. This just appropriates left wing language for the sake of corporate profit.
So then, what is to be desired?
We must, as filmmakers, keep the audience at a remove from the world of the film, and we as viewers must leave the film world that we watch at a distance and reject any parasocial emotions that fill inside of us. We must desire to be challenged formally and accept that we might be bored from time to time. Sometimes, we might even desire to be bored.
Later in chapter 4 of Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher says:
“Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many – and these are A-level students mind you – will protest that they can’t do it. The most frequent complaint teachers hear is that it’s boring. It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issue here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be ‘boring’. What we are facing here is not just time-honored teenage torpor, but the mismatch between a postliterate ‘New Flesh’ that is ‘too wired to concentrate’ and the conning, concentrational logics of decaying disciplinary systems. To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand. Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp – and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension – that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche.”
We must deny immediate satisfaction to contemplate ideas, to depict ideas, and to challenge the viewer to try to understand them. In Angela Schalenec’s Passing Summer, a writer goes up to a publisher who is disappointed at her reliance upon elliptical sentences. He says something like, ‘at some point, I just wanted to read a normal novel. Do you not want to be understood?’ And she says, “I want to be understood.” And yet Schalenec, in each of the films she has made since that 2002 film, has not removed her own elliptical, naturalistic, and difficult narrative decisions. She wants to be understood, but she doesn’t want to do so by leaving her principles at the wayside.
And so, neither must we, as socialists.
