All Films Are Political, Pt 3

Violence and commerce are bed partners in this arrangement of ours.

You can’t say you want cinema to be less political. Well YOU can do whatever you want, but only say THAT if you want cinema to resemble life far less than it already does. This past week we’ve been exploring the case for why all films are political. We started it off with the argument itself, and then looked at how identity politics, representation, and perspective, are not only great tools for entertainment, but also inherently political. In today’s post — the not-yet-final post of the series, we will explore a few more aspects on the list, starting with violence. And yes, after we finish I will give you the TL;DR list to help you keep it all in check.

how do we move on from our old tools and playthings?

Last time round, we delved into representation, and as much as representation gets most of the discussion in the political space, we have at least two if not more political themes so firmly engrained into the cinema ecosystem, we rarely see it or even comment on it.

Okay, it’s not as if we don’t discuss the embrace of Hollywood and the GSPs’ fetish for violence. In so much cinema, violence is glorious. I can enjoy a bullet ballet or blood-soaked finale as much as anyone, but violence is so regularly utilized as spectacle that it is often devoid of meaning or truth — and the longer or more often goes long, the hard it becomes to excavate that truth. We present violence as natural and the solution to many a circumstance. And we don’t offer an alternative or an escape. Violence-as-a-solution is likely the dominant philosophy of our storytellers and that is profoundly political. We should talk about it more often frankly, because for most of us it remains significantly entertaining.

Violence’s primacy is perhaps trumped by another even more insidious political view, but very few folks talk about this one (although some do). Hollywood in particular favors the hero’s journey – the tale of one individual changing something in triumph over another. Frankly, individual’s influence is not how the world generally works, but we’ve embraced this narrative for so long, we fit most actions in it when we choose to publicize it. We diminish the role of others and the community in general in most occurrences in cinema, and thus not only don’t give them their due, and in doing so, we erode the respect and confidence we might otherwise have in the community and organized action. Sigh.

One person triumphing against the system is another classic narrative that gets repeatedly played despite being pretty much counter to all that I have seen in this world. My affection for the underdog is probably due to this dominance and would not have been learned if it wasn’t for Hollywood and other thematic-delivery systems. How did I get so locked in to the outsider perspective? I caught the bug because we spread it like a virus. But hey, I don’t mind; they are giving me what I want even if it distorts my perception of the world.

As much as such myths and religions established my own symbolic registry, is something altogether different happening in that regards with the kids these days?