Not sure if this is a proper post to this community, but I’ve been trying to be more active so figured I’d give it a shot. Mostly just want to get this off my chest really.
I’ve had a similar feeling with The Boys, also on Amazon Prime, where for the most part you’re just watching something that’s fun, dark, and light hearted, but seems to be intentionally peppered with anti-capitalist rhetoric, but like, in a safe way. The platform being owned by the richest most capitalist dickhead on Earth probably has something to do with it, but really that’s just how capital works: it co-opts the social and cultural anxieties of the era into a form that can be packaged and sold, and so on and on it goes.
But there’s one line in the show that I can’t help but feel does have something sinister behind it, and it’s Moldaver’s line: “I’m not a communist, Mr. Howard. That’s just a dirty word they use to describe people who aren’t insane.”
Without going into her character too much, she seems to be a scientist that’s more focused on finishing her research on cold fusion than aligning herself with any sort of political ideology, so she’s using the communists as a means to an end. But the fact that she’s aligning herself with the communists, giving speeches to communists, understands that capitalism is undermining her research and is leading to a worse world, then why wouldn’t she just be explicitly communist, unless the showrunners are trying to imply something very specific about communism, or at least, a sentiment towards communism?
Now I may be reading way, way too much into this, but there’s something nagging at the back of my head about this kind of wording, that these kinds of sentiments represented in liberal media are used in a way to actually reinforce negative stereotypes about communism by acknowledging that while right wingers do misuse that word to mean essentially ‘anything they don’t like’, that you still shouldn’t be asking too many questions about communism itself because that’s irrelevant. In essence, you don’t have to be an “extremist” to poke fun at conservatives, implying in a weird round-a-bout way that communism itself is too extreme for most people, and isn’t exactly a position a true intellectual should take.
I remember feeling something similar during The Last of Us when Joel brother denies he’s a communist but his wife says something to the effect, “No, we literally are, this is a commune, we’re communists.” It’s played for laughs and it’s harmless enough, but it still seems to be one of those weird lines that seemingly puts a positive spin on communism, but ultimately reinforces the idea that it’s an outlandish concept that doesn’t really deserve further scrutiny, or at the very least, seems to be content on keeping the term vague enough so that you can reasonably argue that the showrunners could fall on either side of some argument of whether or not ‘communism is acceptable’.
I understand that communism is a bit complicated of a subject to thoroughly explore in a show meant for mass appeal, but I can’t help but feel that these shows are intentionally messing with the cultural anxiety of aligning yourself with communism, and maybe intentionally, maybe not, reinforcing the idea that people shouldn’t align themselves with communism through some sort of meta-narrative hidden wink.
That’s all. thx.
Yup. valid. All this anti-capitalist mass media is recuperation, indulging a little fantasy of resistance and change as a treat without putting forth any ideas that might actually be dangerous. This is a whole thing, there’s a lot of theory and discourse on how capital appropriates, neutralizes, and then sells safe anti-capitalist sentiment.
CW: violence against marketers, crude language, telling marketers to kill themselves
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY
Bill Hicks telling marketers to kill themselves
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
“One may dye their hair green and wear their grandma’s coat all they want. Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead.”capital doesn’t give a fuck what you say as long as it produces short term profits. any media property that does have genuine sentiment in it will be bought up, laundered, and hollowed out in pursuit of profit, and, in the process, thoroughly castrated. doing commie shit in a safe, marketable, fashionable way simultaneously makes capitalists money and takes the revolutionary potential out of their enemies’ messaging. its a great deal (for them)
Im reminded of a Michael Parenti quote from one of his talks. I’m paraphrasing here but he basically said “When people ask me if I’m a Marxist I say I’d wear that label proudly if I thought you understood what I mean when I say Marxist.”
Peoples general understanding of what a Communist is or what their ideology is so warped by propaganda, that there is almost no sense in claiming that title outside of Marxist circles. That’s how I understood the exchange in the show.
In fact when you consider the context of the speech she gave in the scene before:
"These soldiers that we’re fighting abroad, their families, we have more in common with them than we do with the people here in power, the real enemy.”
Which feels like a reference to The Main Enemy Is At Home! by Karl Liebknecht.
So is it liberals coding themselves as the ethical ones or is this a more grounded image of a Communist operating in highly hostile territory?
Remains to be seen I think.
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Frankly with how much they’ve changed the basic plot of Fallout for this show a line like that barely even registers. Whereas before the show the world of Fallout was one where unfettered capitalism and resource consumption inevitably lead to the great war and the destruction of life on earth as we know it, the show very specifically and deliberately goes full conspiracy-theory: A bunch of specifically very evil companies conspired together to sabotage peace talks with the specific intent to cause the great war. Reading about the show on some other website some guy asked why Amazon makes so many shows about evil corporations and the answer to that is obvious: If you show a clearly evil corporation doing clearly evil things you also imply that companies that do not do those clearly evil things are not evil, but are at least morally neutral. Really there’s so much more stuff in the show that - deliberately or accidentally - muddles an anti-capitalist reading of the universe it’s hard to know where even to start.
i think the lines about fiduciary responsibility, which while literally explained in the show, probably flew over a lot of viewers—is damn close to a systemic analysis of capital.
but as you say quite recoverable, if the fiduciary responsibility of making apocalypse is on corpos selling it; corpos should simply not “sell” it and everything will be fine
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It’s just aesthetics.
Which is funny because the hogs will interpret such things as: “see! Hollywood is all woke communists!”
It’s a continuation of the ideology connected to the movements inspired by socdems like AOC and Bernie that’s basically like “we’re not communists, we’re socialists (lol), which is kind of the same thing but less authoritarian”
Now I may be reading way, way too much into this
Not really, but Fallout’s own lore/satire make it complicated.
I remember feeling something similar during The Last of Us when Joel brother denies he’s a communist but his wife says something to the effect, “No, we literally are, this is a commune, we’re communists.” It’s played for laughs and it’s harmless enough, but it still seems to be one of those weird lines that seemingly puts a positive spin on communism
The Fallout games, under their post-apocalyptic setting, is a satire of a hyper-1950s American society projected into the retro-future. This includes a divergent timeline where a McCarthyist cold war against “Communist” China. The games also came out long before all the anti-china nonsense of today. This residual anti-communism exists in the post-war period like the other aesthetic features in the bombed-out cities and cultures. In the playable sections of the games, (1, 2, NV) not much is made of this among wastelanders, as most are worried about the day-to-day survival and rebuilding, which itself is a juxtaposition against the ideologies the pre-war society thought so important. Much of the games spend time poking fun at this.
Probably the most liberal take is the opening line from the first game: “War. War never changes.” This implies a kind of eternality of the human condition from which we cannot escape, and the games do lean into this worldview intentionally or not.
these kinds of sentiments represented in liberal media are used in a way to actually reinforce negative stereotypes about communism by acknowledging that while right wingers do misuse that word to mean essentially ‘anything they don’t like’, that you still shouldn’t be asking too many questions about communism itself because that’s irrelevant. In essence, you don’t have to be an “extremist” to poke fun at conservatives, implying in a weird round-a-bout way that communism itself is too extreme for most people, and isn’t exactly a position a true intellectual should take.
This is also correct, as mass-media is filtered through capitalism and thus must contort itself to either fit in or at least fly over the head of the censors. It’s hard to draw whether the character has this worldview because of the Fallout lore or our world is seeping in. Likewise, as pieces of fiction, both the games and the show are written by people situated within a capitalist society, so its hard to draw conclusions about the characters and situation that isn’t as contrived as the narrative itself. It’s complicated.
I agree with you 100% comrade.
myself and my partner both hated the show for how black and white all the characters are, it’s VERY todd howard, bad people are comically evil, like RoboCop bad guys, but the show takes itself SO seriously. the ‘good guys’ are basically flawless.
othershit that annoyed me
other shit that really bothered me is the showrunners who care about fallout, destroyed shady sands, one of the first locations you go in fallout 1. the only reason being to give the brotherhood of steel character a tragic backstory, it felt especially like a fuck you to the original game.
the overseers wife/ protags dead mother only exists to give the characters tragic backstory.
the ghoul’s cartoonishly evil wife is Black, leading the American hero astray.
anti communist shit you mentioned (I screamed). they call the ghoul a pinko at one point, but I think it’s more foreshadowing that he’ll be literally pink, wow, very writing.
last episode spoilers
WHAT THE FUCK THE CAPITALISTS DROPPED THE NUKES ON THEMSELVES, it doesn’t make sense.
oh and fucking adding a roomba so amazon exists in fallout now.
:::
anyway I’m so mad at todd howard I actually started playing fallout 1, it’s funny, it’s clever, the story is better, it’s ‘fun’.
the tv show isnt canon, and neither are anything bethesda has touched, you can’t change my mind.
at least seeing people in power suits kick and stomp on people was fun.
sorry this is more of an insomnia rant than a proper engagement with your post. 😎
Hold on. When the bombs drop America is in the height of a new red scare and the middle of a hot war with China. Naturally the Americans depicted at the start of the show are rabid anticommunists. That’s why they call him Pinko. By that time he has already been outed as a “Communist” by the american media and government. Its deliberately reflective of the McCarthy era blacklisting and anticommunist sentiment. So I’m not sure how you read that as anything but a critique on McCarthyism especially when you consider the whole arc of the character.
Unless I’m misunderstanding your statement.
I just dont have a lot of faith in the writers I guess, I understood what it could mean, but the matriarchal figure saying ‘yeah nah communism bad’ doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. I read it as them being clever.
also, insomnia so my brain doesn’t work rn
You really summed up what I thought but really couldnt put into words. At least the overall story arc was pretty spot on for capitalism being a death cult. Company nukes to sell their vaults and outlast competitors by cryofreezing themselves and putting a brain in a jar. That’s one of the most realistic analogies to real life corpos and the show
It’s kind of an open secret that the proto-Enclave and Vault Tec launched the war if you read between the lines. But they fucked up and also it wasn’t about capitalism more than clearing the slate of “undesirables” and opening up resource exploitation in space after the last oil rig ran out.
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House at least was portrayed fairly well, in that he was clearly internally “What is this dumb fucking plan I need to emergency page my platinum chip guy right now?!” but, since he’s smart but not half as smart as he thinks he is, is still dumb enough to be at this meeting in person.
I think that her not embracing the label along with the over the top and cartoonishly evil megacorporation take away a bit from the anti-capitalist and potentially revolutionary messaging that the show could have had.
I haven’t played the games enough, but considering the show is being lauded as faithful to the games I can see why that’s the case as well. Most, if not all of the games, skew more towards a liberal view of the world.
but considering the show is being lauded as faithful to the games
the bethesda games, maybe
Yeah, the first game’s intro literally has the US invading Canada and executing civilians in the street, while the US media praises “our brave boys fighting for our country”.
i agree with the post but i want to do my rant on the cold fusion since you mentioned it
so they clearly had a Macguffin Problem when they were trying to make their macguffin for the show: miracle technology that’d fix the world today exists in the setting. there are hand-held fusion reactors that can power an entire underground electrified community. there are miniature fusion reactors that exist simply to make laser beams to shoot people. some writer vaguely remembered Cold Fusion as the Miracle Power Solution from some decades ago, and decided to run with that
but the thing is, cold fusion is proposed to fix the problems of ‘hot’ fusion, the collossal materials requirements and engineering difficulties from making a solar reaction in a controlled environment. Fallout solved that. you can carry a fucking fusion reactor around town by hand. Cold fusion, as a concept, not even as a crackpot concept, is meaningless in that universe. utterly redundant.
also i think there’s something in the old writing to the fact that the US for all purposes perfected fusion technology, the thing that could fix the energy problems of the whole world; and then still killed the planet to maintain political dominance
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Also seems like tech the enclave would sit on and use as political power, kinda in an even more extreme petro-dollar way
Edit: as well as electrical power
all the easily mineable hot fusion materials were mostly extracted before the big war
that’s the difference between fision and fusion; fission uses radioactive isotopes which are fairly rare, fusion uses shit we can make from abundant elements. deuterium and tritium are both hydrogen, we ain’t lacking for hydrogen
I remember the cold fusion in Starcraft could fit in an eski with beers around it, so pretty cold
It’s literally just playing on Red Scare imagery to convince libs that they’re on the right side, even if the chuds call them Communists
Communism is bad, but you’re good, which is not bad, so you are good
I’m only on episode 4 and while it’s better than the games have done with the setting lately, it’s still a shallow pastiche of elements the series already did and usually better.
“I’m not a communist, Mr. Howard. That’s just a dirty word they use to describe people who aren’t insane.”
Well… it’s cultural in a sense : the same “insanity” from John Brown against it “own kind” or Christopher Dorner against it’s “collegue”. For barbarian, civilization is insanity. It about the narrative from a section of barbaria.
