Radical Cinema and Recuperation
Ideology has been imbued into cinema since its inception. Even seemingly harmless family films like Home Alone (Chris Columbus, 1990) propagate the ideals of the American dream and the nuclear family. A child living his dream of eating junk food all day and watching television while also engaging in extreme violence against home invaders, who are an unimagined threat. An American to his core!
However, there has always been progressive cinema as well. Wings (William Wellman, 1927), the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, famously included a gay kiss. This is subversive not because it promotes homosexuality (it doesn’t), but because it shows an alternative to heterosexuality. It challenges the idea that love can only exist in a heterosexual context — that men cannot love other men.
These exemplify the two most prominent ways in which films deal with the dominant ideology: they either take it for granted or they challenge it. Bertolt Brecht argued that there is no way to challenge the dominant ideology without using radical formal techniques. In Brecht’s view, Wings’ conventional formal techniques (it was a Hollywood studio film) would prevent it from having a politicizing effect because it becomes first and foremost a commodity rather than a catalyst for change. To Brecht, a film with a radical message must have a radical form as well. The film must not be too formally challenging, though, or it would make it hard for an audience member to engage with it. Any number of Jean-Luc Godard’s, Chantal Akerman’s, and Spike Lee’s films could fit this description.
But what happens after a film has been released? Does it remain radical forever? Guy Debord and the Situationist International theorized that even radical art can be co-opted by the same authorities it denounces. In “Preliminaries Toward Defining a Unitary Revolutionary Program,” they stated that “art is purely and simply co-opted by capitalism as a means of conditioning the population” (Guy Debord and Pierre Canjuers, I-8). Debord and the Situationist International believed that radical art was “allowed” to exist as a way for societies to make it seem like there is freedom of thought and multiple voices in a political conversation. They describe it as “an alibi for the alienation of all other activities.” They meant that while art is allowed to express radical ideas, these same ideas cannot be expressed in a non-artistic setting. An excellent example of this is Elon Musk claiming Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019) was his favorite movie of that year, Donald Trump claiming Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) was his favorite film of all time, or the number of people who idolize The Wolf of Wall Street’s Jordan Belfort (Martin Scorsese, 2013). These two far-right capitalist billionaires would never accept the message of these films if they were not embedded in a widely respected work of art. Other famous examples include the mass production of Che Guevara shirts, the now-meaningless anarchist symbol, and any number of radical political slogans that have made their way into neoliberal politicians’ vocabulary.
So what happens to films like Total Recall (Verhoeven, 1990)? Or Robocop (1987)? They get mass-marketed, mass-produced, and turned into franchises. Other films, like Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019) and Nomadland (Chloé Zhao, 2020) get a lot of meaningless awards and are relegated to the annals of the Oscars’ Best Picture winners. They get talked about by the people it criticizes, and these same people ignore the poor and the houseless who say the same things as the films they praise.
The Situationist International promoted a way for radicals to fight back: détournement. This was the incorporation of capitalist media into radical media, the “sampling” of different forms of art that supports the status quo into subversive forms of art. One could be reminded of the way that Birth of a Nation (DW Griffith, 1915) was used in BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee, 2018), or the way that Godard mocked other people’s work in his own films, or maybe the way some “Youtube poops” have turned transphobic sentiments into trans-positive clips.
Despite all this, the actual politics of the text are unaffected by whether or not they have been recuperated. Parasite and Citizen Kane remain critical of the sociopathic rich people our society produces. Total Recall and Robocop still criticize the profit-over-people attitude of corporations. They are works of art, as well as commodities.
Cover Photo courtesy of CJ Entertainment.