I don’t even mean a bad thing, necessarily. I mean a thing that is made to normalize the status quo, pave over inherent contradictions in late stage neoliberal capitalism, make even the idea of changing society somewhat seem evil or impossible, and have lots of performative gestures that hide the stench of affluent arrogance. :zizek-preference:
I know it came out well before 2020, but I finally got around to seeing Iron Man 2 and I stopped at the instant Tony Stark said “I’ve successfully privatized world peace.” It was bad. Very bad. The original movie was entertaining even if it had some painful deliberate adjustments to the comic book character to make him more like :my-hero: but the sequel played out like Ayn Rand fanfiction, especially the big smart awesome genius giving a speech about how the evil government and the ungrateful moochers were taking the sweat from his brow and so on and so on. :zizek:
The flood of MCU movies wore me out to the point that I stopped watching them and because of that I have only seen maybe half of them by now. Maybe it was a mistake returning to try watching Iron Man 2 because I now have even less interest in seeing anything MCU ever again. :zizek-fuck:
perhaps an obvious one but im gonna say black panther, not just for killmonger being based and them having to make him kill his girlfriend for no reason to make him look like the bad guy, but for its portrayal of the international rules-based order
borrowing from an old comment, the thing that i found most interesting about that movie is that killmonger completely plays by all the countrys rules to come into power - he comes from the appropriate royal bloodline, he gets the backing of one of the major feudal lords, he comes in openly and challenges the sitting monarch who accepts the challenge without coercion (and as we saw earlier in the movie, challenge to personal combat is a normal and accepted means of transfer of power), and then he wins decisively and kills the sitting monarch (as far as anyone knows). all of this is ludicrous crusader kings shit and an absurd way to run an enlightened modern country, but he plays by the rules.
and the very second that somebody they dont like gets into power, what is the rules-based “liberal” response? pro-royalist military coup, openly backed by literally the cia. they only find out the black panther guy is alive later, so they still think hes dead when they throw it all into motion but that doesnt stop them. and the movie is written in a way that makes this seem like the obviously logical and honourable and correct thing to do, and that these are the good guys that you should support. and at the end stability is restored, and even though hes a hereditary monarch without even the figleaf of parliamentary oversight, hes pro-western and he says nice things in speeches so thats basically the same as democracy right?
like even in the most woke lib “pro-black” blockbuster movie, cia-backed coup is just seen as the obvious response to any thorny political questions.
but hey, they did open one (1) community centre at the end so the injustice faced by black people worldwide was pretty much solved :liberalism:
it’s also not talked about much but Black Panther as a depiction of African life is comparable to the film coming to America.
I was pretty liberal when it came out and even then found it kinda gross that in this allegedly super advanced utopian African country, the monarch (with absolute arbitrary ruling power) is determined by who is best at stick fighting. Like u can imagine them having laser guns and robot suits but their political structures still have to be a racist caricature of “tribal” societies.
Black Panther is not anti Trump. It’s pro Trump. It’s literally propaganda that people didn’t even know they were eating up. The country is ethnically homogenous - the only people in Wakanda are Wakandans. There are a few different cults, and a few different dialects, but they all speak the same language. If you forget that Wakanda is supposed to be in East Africa, it starts to sound an awful lot like a Trumpian fantasy land. Here is an example, albeit fictional, where a walled-in nation is thriving, self-reliant, and completely unaccommodating of outsiders. Simply replace the geographic location, the race, and the language, and it really looks like the United States that President Trump fantasized about - if only coal had the power and value of Vibranium.