You forgot ncis
But Captain America is a* good *movie.
“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.
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.
Legally, access to government resources shouldn’t depend on how you portray the government
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.
