Copaganda
Crazy how much of this stuff is subsidized by or directly financed by the national security state. The most infamous, in my memory anyway, was the Transformers Franchise which got enormous access to US military staff and equipment during the shooting. The end result was a movie that felt more like one of those hookey 80s “Join the Marines” ads than a piece of action cinema.
I kinda get it though…it’s not like these armed forces are producing the movie themselves.
The studio wants to make a movie about/involving these entities. They want it to be as realistic as possible and the entity itself has the authority to give them access that it could also deny.
If you’re in charge of, say, the Marines PR department, you’re constantly trying to make the Corps look good and boost recruitment. If you can do this for next to nothing against your budget by granting access to a studio making a film that will give you essentially free PR, that’s a great move. The bigger the movies potential, the more the entity in question is motivated to support it.
On the other hand, if the film is going to make your organization look bad, no PR person with a functioning brain is going to help that project in any way.
Idunno, I feel like these organizations do enough actually bad things, that I don’t feel the urge to crucify them for cultivating image and working to generate positive PR.
The studio wants to make a movie about/involving these entities.
Studios want cheap special effects budgets and the MIC wants cheap labor. So you get what amounts to a promotional video for branches of the service, paid for out of the operating budgets of these agencies.
Idunno, I feel like these organizations do enough actually bad things, that I don’t feel the urge to crucify them for cultivating image and working to generate positive PR.
I think a big part of the “doing bad things” process is facilitated by whitewashing our activities in Kandahar or Fallujah with “We’re just cool dudes fighting big monsters” action movie propaganda. Is Transformers as egregious as Rambo II or American Sniper? Not strictly. But its geared towards a younger audience, so it can’t do the same kind of blood-drenched jingoism in that way.
I would consider gulling 12-year-olds into aspiring to become conscript killers for the oil & gas industry overseas pretty fucking bad, though.
“But they’re just TV shows” “it’s not that deep” etc. I would implore you to listen to this excellent episode of Citations Needed..
It covers how modern cop shows were invented directly to counter shows that portrayed defence lawyers as the protagonists, along with a general push to lionize the police state despite its inability to prevent crime or deliver real justice.
Where does stuff like Brooklyn 99 come in?
Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead.
Disco Elysium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)
Some former means of countercultural expression that have been identified by critics as recuperated (at least in part) are: punk music and fashion like mohawk hairdos, ripped jeans, and bondage accessories like dog collars; tattoos; street art and participatory art.
(You know, like Paul Ryan liking Rage Against the Machine.)
Because Capitalism is built to sell anything, even ideas.
Do you remember Reddit’s Random Acts of Pizza from around 2010-2012 or so?
https://abcnews.go.com/US/random-acts-pizza-donate/story?id=13950694 (This story is from June 2011)
It was a really sweet forum where people were buying hungry folks in need a pizza. Something simple and comforting for people struggling.
Within a year of a handful of news articles about the subreddit, and Mars Candy had copyrighted the phrase “Random Acts of Chocolate” and pushed an ad campaign about “buying an extra for a friend” as a “random act of chocolate.”
https://www.cspdailynews.com/snacks-candy/mars-distributing-random-acts-chocolate (This is from September 2011)
https://www.thismomneedswine.com/2011/03/free-chocolate-bar.html (A blog post from March 2011 about free coupons for chocolate)
Part of how they recuperate things is through mechanisms like copyright and trademarks, these laws are built protect businesses but bind individuals. Random Acts of Pizza is just a subreddit but Random Acts of Chocolate is copyrighted, trademarked, and owned by Mars, Inc. Meaning in some ways I am barred from using the phrase “Random Acts of Chocolate” since they own it.
EDIT:
I almost forgot my favorite example: Naomi Klein’s book “This Changes Everything.” The thesis is that if we don’t dump capitalistic modes of production we’ll all fall to climate change. However, she still relied on traditional capitalist publishers to get her book published and sold. She didn’t put her money where her mouth was and release it online for free for everyone, to show she was willing to dump capitalism to spread her message, since it was that important. Nope, still gotta use capitalism to critique capitalism, I guess. She also will speak at your university for a cool $100k. I think she believes in her thesis less than she says she does.
Captain America is a weird one to include. Not denying it’s probaganda, everything is, but throwing Cap in with copaganda is such a serface level take. He’s probaganda for American exceptionalism sure, but also embodies it in an old school New Deal way. The character has been consistently anti-facist over the years.
Imo Iron Man is the much more harmful propaganda. You can pretty much draw a direct line between the characters rise in popularity thanks to the MCU and the rise of Elon Musk.
Any superhero movie is problematic. They all say that only a few special people can save the country and the world. The rest of the population just has to hold tight and let the important people do their thing. It’s just a small step by replacing powers with wealth to give the rich carte blanche to do as they please.
Thanks for putting this into words. I’ve had a vague discontent and disgruntlement with superhero crap for a long time. While this isn’t the only reason I dislike superhero movies, this is a big part of it.
I do still like The Punisher movie with Jain, Dredd, The Crow, and a few others. Antiheros in general. They’re also more human and not as one dimensional.
Not those scenes in Spider-Man where New York throws random objects at the villain until they relent. Hell yeah solidarity.
I wonder if that’s a limit of storytelling. Grand social change is hard to film. Even team effort cohesion requires a lot of actors and writing to pull off.
No matter how sound the morals and story, if it’s not entertaining, it might fail as mass media.
Oh I agree completely. There is a fascist aspect inherent to Superheroes. Cap is just one lf the less egregious ones.
I mean, I’ve definitely seen Cap used to represent the Ugly American in comics, especially during that period post-9/11.
He’s definitely not fully anti-fascist coded, because he represents the US, and the US while ostensibly being democratic, is in many ways deeply fascist and always has been. Hitler was inspired by our Jim Crow laws.
There’s some smart people who understand that America never actually stood for any of that stuff and they write Cap to be the same.
He’s propaganda for American exceptionalism sure, but also embodies it in an old school New Deal way. The character has been consistently anti-facist over the years.
Pretending that America isn’t only already fascist, but inspired the fascists they are supposedly against is American exceptionalism, and you’re eating it right up.
Kind of what the whole thing in civil war was. Tony was looking to absolve his guilt over the people they failed to save while looking for more and more authoritarian methods of keeping the world “safe”.
Cap was much more for freedom and while the idea that the avengers should have absolutely no oversight is absurd, the question of who should be the oversight was important and much of what the avengers did could not wait on a committee to decide to act (also, the last time a committee did act they decided to nuke New York)
People kept calling Musk – Stark because they thought he was a scientist/genius. Like the MCU fake tech was gonna be birthed out of this immature edge lord that steals people’s idea with stolen money.
Yeah I kinda disagree with Cap as well. He also explicitly refutes the government to stand up what he believes is right in Civil War too.
I think part of it’s that not all propaganda is bad.
There’s probably a term for it, but I’d draw a distinction between “opinion” propaganda and “aspirational” propaganda.
One tries to change your opinion of something, like “cops are good noble and always do the right thing”.
The other encourages the viewer to live up to some ideal. It’s entirely possible for that ideal to also not be great, but even then “I should be” is better than “they are”.
A lot of PSAs and things from the ad council fall in the later category. Like the billboards that basically say “real men are present and emotionally available fathers to their children” or "good parents teach their kids healthy diet and exercise by example”.
They’re openly cases of the government trying to change public opinions or attitudes (which arguably makes them better examples of propaganda than a lot of commercial television), but they don’t feel as objectionable.
“This honest and kind man who always tries to do good and help those around him to the point that it overshadows him being a physically perfect human is the embodiment of the emblematic American man” is more in that aspirational category.
Fuck America and its Captain. All MCU shit is propaganda to brainwash yanks to believe in their inherent goodness and exceptionalism.
