COMMENTARY
Commentary
Commentary
INTRO. In the wake of the global financial crisis, filmmakers turned to exceptional times in our historical past to find analogies that comment urgently on the present: race relations that had reached a boiling point in 1967 Detroit, Depression-era politics as they played out in 1930s Hollywood, the disenfranchised poor in early 19th-century Manchester suffering under the Corn Laws, and the heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire nearing the beginning of its end. In each instance, a crystallizing and under-reported event is homed in on that has tragic implications for the present.
1. Detroit in 1967, Hollywood in 1934, Manchester in 1819, Budapest in 1913 – each time and place represents a flash point in history. Tensions had been running high in each case owing to systemic inequality exacerbated by pressing circumstances, leading to a volatile, powder keg situation in which a minor incident can spark a conflagration. Even as chaos and disorder threaten to break out, the powers that be with an interest in maintaining the status quo stand ready and on guard to maintain their dominance and control, both sides ready for violence.
2. The asymmetry in power has led to a pushback in each instance from the people against the authorities. This attempt at collective political action is represented in a variety of ways, from peaceful methods like the agitation for legal parliamentary reform to extend suffrage to the poor or the proposal in an electoral campaign of socialist policies including progressive taxation and public works; to riots exploding from intolerable everyday circumstances of apartheid-like conditions defined by racist policing, or the eruption of an anarchist mob bent on destructive, revolutionary violence.
3. A sense of powerlessness pervades the films owing not only to the depiction of crushed or destructive collective political action, but through personal stories of failed intervention at the level of the individual, with protagonists who bear witness to systemic injustice but are unable to alter the outcome of historical events when forces far more powerful are at work that either put their lives at risk or render their efforts at resistance insignificant. They can put the pieces together and make sense of a conspiracy but remain impotent to effect change.
4. There is no mistaking the contemporary resonances to each film in question: whether responding to Black Lives Matter, the delegitimization of progressive politicans like Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn, the pivot to the right of the Labour Party and its neglect of the working class, or the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, filmmakers around the world are invoking the past to comment on the present. It may say something about the censorship of the market that prevents our cinema from addressing head-on current social reality, necessitating the allegorization of historical events.
5. Law and order is resorted to and abused as a means for those in positions of power to maintain their authority, while no expense is spared in campaign donations or to mobilize mass media owned by those with vested interests to sway public opinion, smearing political opponents as a dangerous threat to “our” way of life with their imported ideologies. Meanwhile, discontent continues to brew and refuses to be contained in recurring violent outbursts of riotous, mob-like behavior that provokes equal if not disproportionate violence in repressive counter-measures.
6. The films depict a corrupt and unjust society in which politics is controlled by those with the financial resources or hereditary right to shape its outcome, whereby the order of an exploitative system is maintained through the brutal exercise of repressive violence, abused by those who wield it at lower levels of authority. They reflect the bleak mood of public distrust throughout the 2010s and the era’s populist outrage against the political establishment and its elites, perceived as presiding over a kleptocracy that has allowed capitalist greed to overwhelm democratic ideals.
7. Each film is centered around a cataclysmic event that it builds towards not solely as an instance of personal tragedy whereby culpable individuals ought to be held responsible for their actions and bystanders might wish to atone for their failure to intervene, but as structural occurrences and systemic outcomes that indict the nature of the system itself. Whether it’s the Algiers motel killings, Upton Sinclair’s electoral defeat, the Peterloo massacre, or the apocalyptic fall of Budapest, the films show an inexorable logic that leads from societal forces to these tragedies.
8. Individuals should be held accountable for their roles and actions in the making of historical tragedies and indeed they are named by the films – racist and sadistic cops, powerful studio heads and newspaper tycoons, fearful, reactionary magistrates... – but there is a sense in the films that they too lack true agency but rather foolishly and obstinately remain on the wrong side of history, stumbling their way without thought through the ignorant, blind instincts of self-interest and sheer self-preservation, led by paranoia and fears of their own that complement the protagonist’s.
9. The passive, reactive role of the protagonist as being swept up by historical forces and the maelstrom of politics beyond his or her control is further reinforced through their sense of guilt and complicity in the personal tragedies they witnessed but were powerless to prevent from happening. There is a sense of shame and disgust – of self-loathing – at the realization that one is not just a victim but has served as an accomplice. In other cases, one is too shell-shocked and disoriented to do anything other than to fall prey to the chaos.
10. Power reasserts itself in the most dispiriting of ways: the aftermath of the crisis in each film consists of a return to normalcy or “business as usual” whereby the outburst of a violent challenge to the status quo is followed by the systematic restoration of things as they were: the mockery of justice in the courtroom with the expert discrediting of witnesses and victims by defense attorneys, admonition from the king to the court jester never to bite the hand that feeds him, abandoning the messianic role of the anarchist...
CODA. The lessons of the past do not augur well for the present: it is suggested that the problems of inequality left unresolved have continued to haunt us in our contemporary social reality. The racial divide in the courtroom meant a jury decision that further reinforced divisions between blacks and whites. Royalty in London emerged unscathed from the massacre of workers in Manchester. The disorder in Budapest is seen as the prelude to WWI and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Only Mank scores a small personal victory in keeping his screenwriting credit.
6. Stories of single moms resorting to sex work to provide for their kids are emblematic of the difficulties in parenting under an economically punishing ideology that moreover atomizes the family and stigmatizes the collective in the name of individual freedom and enterprise. According to neoliberalism, aging working-class women who lose their homes or are terminally ill needing costly medical care hit the road out of choice rather than necessity. Meanwhile, the traditional wife and mother who stays at home has become an anachronism for economic and ideological reasons.
7. Stories of single moms resorting to sex work to provide for their kids are emblematic of the difficulties in parenting under an economically punishing ideology that moreover atomizes the family and stigmatizes the collective in the name of individual freedom and enterprise. According to neoliberalism, aging working-class women who lose their homes or are terminally ill needing costly medical care hit the road out of choice rather than necessity. Meanwhile, the traditional wife and mother who stays at home has become an anachronism for economic and ideological reasons.
CODA. Stories of single moms resorting to sex work to provide for their kids are emblematic of the difficulties in parenting under an economically punishing ideology that moreover atomizes the family and stigmatizes the collective in the name of individual freedom and enterprise. According to neoliberalism, aging working-class women who lose their homes or are terminally ill needing costly medical care hit the road out of choice rather than necessity. Meanwhile, the traditional wife and mother who stays at home has become an anachronism for economic and ideological reasons.
8. Stories of single moms resorting to sex work to provide for their kids are emblematic of the difficulties in parenting under an economically punishing ideology that moreover atomizes the family and stigmatizes the collective in the name of individual freedom and enterprise. According to neoliberalism, aging working-class women who lose their homes or are terminally ill needing costly medical care hit the road out of choice rather than necessity. Meanwhile, the traditional wife and mother who stays at home has become an anachronism for economic and ideological reasons.
INTRO. In the wake of the global financial crisis, filmmakers turned to exceptional times in our historical past to find analogies that comment urgently on the present: race relations that had reached a boiling point in 1967 Detroit, Depression-era politics as they played out in 1930s Hollywood, the disenfranchised poor in early 19th-century Manchester suffering under the Corn Laws, and the heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire nearing the beginning of its end. In each instance, a crystallizing and under-reported event is homed in on that has tragic implications for the present.
1. Detroit in 1967, Hollywood in 1934, Manchester in 1819, Budapest in 1913 – each time and place represents a flash point in history. Tensions had been running high in each case owing to systemic inequality exacerbated by pressing circumstances, leading to a volatile, powder keg situation in which a minor incident can spark a conflagration. Even as chaos and disorder threaten to break out, the powers that be with an interest in maintaining the status quo stand ready and on guard to maintain their dominance and control, both sides ready for violence.
2. The asymmetry in power has led to a pushback in each instance from the people against the authorities. This attempt at collective political action is represented in a variety of ways, from peaceful methods like the agitation for legal parliamentary reform to extend suffrage to the poor or the proposal in an electoral campaign of socialist policies including progressive taxation and public works; to riots exploding from intolerable everyday circumstances of apartheid-like conditions defined by racist policing, or the eruption of an anarchist mob bent on destructive, revolutionary violence.
3. A sense of powerlessness pervades the films owing not only to the depiction of crushed or destructive collective political action, but through personal stories of failed intervention at the level of the individual, with protagonists who bear witness to systemic injustice but are unable to alter the outcome of historical events when forces far more powerful are at work that either put their lives at risk or render their efforts at resistance insignificant. They can put the pieces together and make sense of a conspiracy but remain impotent to effect change.
4. There is no mistaking the contemporary resonances to each film in question: whether responding to Black Lives Matter, the delegitimization of progressive politicans like Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn, the pivot to the right of the Labour Party and its neglect of the working class, or the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, filmmakers around the world are invoking the past to comment on the present. It may say something about the censorship of the market that prevents our cinema from addressing head-on current social reality, necessitating the allegorization of historical events.
5. Law and order is resorted to and abused as a means for those in positions of power to maintain their authority, while no expense is spared in campaign donations or to mobilize mass media owned by those with vested interests to sway public opinion, smearing political opponents as a dangerous threat to “our” way of life with their imported ideologies. Meanwhile, discontent continues to brew and refuses to be contained in recurring violent outbursts of riotous, mob-like behavior that provokes equal if not disproportionate violence in repressive counter-measures.
6. The films depict a corrupt and unjust society in which politics is controlled by those with the financial resources or hereditary right to shape its outcome, whereby the order of an exploitative system is maintained through the brutal exercise of repressive violence, abused by those who wield it at lower levels of authority. They reflect the bleak mood of public distrust throughout the 2010s and the era’s populist outrage against the political establishment and its elites, perceived as presiding over a kleptocracy that has allowed capitalist greed to overwhelm democratic ideals.
7. Each film is centered around a cataclysmic event that it builds towards not solely as an instance of personal tragedy whereby culpable individuals ought to be held responsible for their actions and bystanders might wish to atone for their failure to intervene, but as structural occurrences and systemic outcomes that indict the nature of the system itself. Whether it’s the Algiers motel killings, Upton Sinclair’s electoral defeat, the Peterloo massacre, or the apocalyptic fall of Budapest, the films show an inexorable logic that leads from societal forces to these tragedies.
8. Individuals should be held accountable for their roles and actions in the making of historical tragedies and indeed they are named by the films – racist and sadistic cops, powerful studio heads and newspaper tycoons, fearful, reactionary magistrates... – but there is a sense in the films that they too lack true agency but rather foolishly and obstinately remain on the wrong side of history, stumbling their way without thought through the ignorant, blind instincts of self-interest and sheer self-preservation, led by paranoia and fears of their own that complement the protagonist’s.
9. The passive, reactive role of the protagonist as being swept up by historical forces and the maelstrom of politics beyond his or her control is further reinforced through their sense of guilt and complicity in the personal tragedies they witnessed but were powerless to prevent from happening. There is a sense of shame and disgust – of self-loathing – at the realization that one is not just a victim but has served as an accomplice. In other cases, one is too shell-shocked and disoriented to do anything other than to fall prey to the chaos.
10. Power reasserts itself in the most dispiriting of ways: the aftermath of the crisis in each film consists of a return to normalcy or “business as usual” whereby the outburst of a violent challenge to the status quo is followed by the systematic restoration of things as they were: the mockery of justice in the courtroom with the expert discrediting of witnesses and victims by defense attorneys, admonition from the king to the court jester never to bite the hand that feeds him, abandoning the messianic role of the anarchist...
CODA. The lessons of the past do not augur well for the present: it is suggested that the problems of inequality left unresolved have continued to haunt us in our contemporary social reality. The racial divide in the courtroom meant a jury decision that further reinforced divisions between blacks and whites. Royalty in London emerged unscathed from the massacre of workers in Manchester. The disorder in Budapest is seen as the prelude to WWI and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Only Mank scores a small personal victory in keeping his screenwriting credit.
1. Globalization’s hollowing out of the working class is reflected in the depiction of aging blue collar fathers whose physical labor involves (pointedly) the construction of homes. Faced with work-related injuries that variously leave them unemployed or dealing with chronic medical conditions that require prohibitively expensive treatments, these characters struggle with neoliberal corporate insurance policies and state welfare directives that make it hard for them to claim legitimate benefits, even as they come to terms with bodies that have become frail that were once robust.
INTRO. In the wake of the global financial crisis, filmmakers turned to exceptional times in our historical past to find analogies that comment urgently on the present: race relations that had reached a boiling point in 1967 Detroit, Depression-era politics as they played out in 1930s Hollywood, the disenfranchised poor in early 19th-century Manchester suffering under the Corn Laws, and the heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire nearing the beginning of its end. In each instance, a crystallizing and under-reported event is homed in on that has tragic implications for the present.
1. Detroit in 1967, Hollywood in 1934, Manchester in 1819, Budapest in 1913 – each time and place represents a flash point in history. Tensions had been running high in each case owing to systemic inequality exacerbated by pressing circumstances, leading to a volatile, powder keg situation in which a minor incident can spark a conflagration. Even as chaos and disorder threaten to break out, the powers that be with an interest in maintaining the status quo stand ready and on guard to maintain their dominance and control, both sides ready for violence.
2. The asymmetry in power has led to a pushback in each instance from the people against the authorities. This attempt at collective political action is represented in a variety of ways, from peaceful methods like the agitation for legal parliamentary reform to extend suffrage to the poor or the proposal in an electoral campaign of socialist policies including progressive taxation and public works; to riots exploding from intolerable everyday circumstances of apartheid-like conditions defined by racist policing, or the eruption of an anarchist mob bent on destructive, revolutionary violence.
3. A sense of powerlessness pervades the films owing not only to the depiction of crushed or destructive collective political action, but through personal stories of failed intervention at the level of the individual, with protagonists who bear witness to systemic injustice but are unable to alter the outcome of historical events when forces far more powerful are at work that either put their lives at risk or render their efforts at resistance insignificant. They can put the pieces together and make sense of a conspiracy but remain impotent to effect change.
4. There is no mistaking the contemporary resonances to each film in question: whether responding to Black Lives Matter, the delegitimization of progressive politicans like Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn, the pivot to the right of the Labour Party and its neglect of the working class, or the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, filmmakers around the world are invoking the past to comment on the present. It may say something about the censorship of the market that prevents our cinema from addressing head-on current social reality, necessitating the allegorization of historical events.
5. Law and order is resorted to and abused as a means for those in positions of power to maintain their authority, while no expense is spared in campaign donations or to mobilize mass media owned by those with vested interests to sway public opinion, smearing political opponents as a dangerous threat to “our” way of life with their imported ideologies. Meanwhile, discontent continues to brew and refuses to be contained in recurring violent outbursts of riotous, mob-like behavior that provokes equal if not disproportionate violence in repressive counter-measures.
6. The films depict a corrupt and unjust society in which politics is controlled by those with the financial resources or hereditary right to shape its outcome, whereby the order of an exploitative system is maintained through the brutal exercise of repressive violence, abused by those who wield it at lower levels of authority. They reflect the bleak mood of public distrust throughout the 2010s and the era’s populist outrage against the political establishment and its elites, perceived as presiding over a kleptocracy that has allowed capitalist greed to overwhelm democratic ideals.
7. Each film is centered around a cataclysmic event that it builds towards not solely as an instance of personal tragedy whereby culpable individuals ought to be held responsible for their actions and bystanders might wish to atone for their failure to intervene, but as structural occurrences and systemic outcomes that indict the nature of the system itself. Whether it’s the Algiers motel killings, Upton Sinclair’s electoral defeat, the Peterloo massacre, or the apocalyptic fall of Budapest, the films show an inexorable logic that leads from societal forces to these tragedies.
8. Individuals should be held accountable for their roles and actions in the making of historical tragedies and indeed they are named by the films – racist and sadistic cops, powerful studio heads and newspaper tycoons, fearful, reactionary magistrates... – but there is a sense in the films that they too lack true agency but rather foolishly and obstinately remain on the wrong side of history, stumbling their way without thought through the ignorant, blind instincts of self-interest and sheer self-preservation, led by paranoia and fears of their own that complement the protagonist’s.
9. The passive, reactive role of the protagonist as being swept up by historical forces and the maelstrom of politics beyond his or her control is further reinforced through their sense of guilt and complicity in the personal tragedies they witnessed but were powerless to prevent from happening. There is a sense of shame and disgust – of self-loathing – at the realization that one is not just a victim but has served as an accomplice. In other cases, one is too shell-shocked and disoriented to do anything other than to fall prey to the chaos.
10. Power reasserts itself in the most dispiriting of ways: the aftermath of the crisis in each film consists of a return to normalcy or “business as usual” whereby the outburst of a violent challenge to the status quo is followed by the systematic restoration of things as they were: the mockery of justice in the courtroom with the expert discrediting of witnesses and victims by defense attorneys, admonition from the king to the court jester never to bite the hand that feeds him, abandoning the messianic role of the anarchist...