![]() (“Thank you, master, may I have another?”). In short, one very weird movie along the whacked-out lines of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. Batman seduces Catwoman to the world of near-limitless luxury and she tosses away her leftist rhetoric. Yeah, sure.) Despite all this, Goebbels-like images of the Occupy movement show an armed mob advancing on overwhelmed, heroic police and the rich dragged from their penthouses to kangaroo courts and firing squads. ![]() Bad capitalists will collapse under their own evil. ![]() That is the film’s overt political message – leave the obscenely rich capitalist alone and he will look after everyone’s needs with great benevolence – as is proper and just. Outlaw Catwoman’s speech to Bruce Wayne about “a storm coming” that will essentially redistribute wealth is actually so inspiring as to make the leftist viewers doubt their own ears (Bruce is our Batman, of course, but also the billionaire philanthropist. He is, as William Blake said of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, the “secret hero.” As Zizek does make his case so well, I encourage you to read the link rather that my merely regurgitating it, but even prior to reading the essay, I remember seeing this film with mouth literally agape. While the movie is overtly reactionary, Zizek establishes that Bane, the movie’s most obvious Id of a villain, acts out the real desires of the film –selfless revolution. Slavoj Zizek has already written an astounding essay on The Dark Knight Rises, a rudderless movie that often seems on unconscious autopilot. I’ll limit my focus to some specific examples, both conscious, unconscious and, in the grand tradition of Hollywood itself, manipulative for capital gain. Still, if the id is invoked, critique of the status quo seems inherent in that invocation. The big budget “A” film has now taken on a great deal of the tropes of the Saturday matinee, insistent on a PG-13 rating even for many of its horror films and certainly for its nearly all of its science fiction and superhero blockbusters. Only a book would do that justice – and one I’d love to be a part of. Larry Cohen’s Q equates a prehistoric bird of ritual sacrificial worship with the American Eagle of capitalism.ĭid anyone notice? Did the suits care? The so-called B movie has always been under the radar and allowed for all sorts of left-leaning critique, so much so it is far beyond the scope of this essay alone. Massacre 2′s ad campaign depicted its distorted patriarchy in the same poses as then-famous teen heart-throbs in their Breakfast Club poster. Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 featured an Alamo amusement park with a canvas mural painting of Ronald Reagan as Davy Crockett, literally bleeding from the mouth like a vampire a few moments before this canvas busts open with a rain of guts. John Carpenter’s They Live is possibly the most subversive film in popular American cinema, equating the status quo hypnosis with a dominating yet hidden alien invasion that must be overthrown by any means necessary. Romero literally spawned an entirely new zombie genre which focused on America devouring itself, best portrayed by the maestro himself in Dawn of the Dead and Land of the Dead. No surprise, then, when some of these directors went on to more overt political critique. ![]() Order may have been an illusion all along, in fact the very source of monstrosity. But then-young filmmakers like George Romero ( Night of the Living Dead), John Carpenter ( Halloween), Larry Cohen ( It’s Alive), David Cronenberg ( Shivers aka T hey Came From Within), Tobe Hooper ( Texas Chainsaw Massacre) and Wes Craven ( Last House on the Left) had a different approach. In traditional Hollywood, the monster is always put away and order is restored. His thesis examined how the traditional horror film enacted the Freudian “return of the repressed,” the forbidden desires that were projected onto the monster who assaulted family, monogamy, gender and the general status quo. In 1979, film critic Robin Wood collected his essays on the horror films of that time and called his book American Nightmare.
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