No.38692
I have noticed a trend in 90s cinema where a disgruntled middle-aged white office worker takes revenge on society by becoming le epic sociopath and/or apathetic dissident.
I feel like it gives extreme license to the middle class fantasies of a recently politically-dispossessed population to start to become terrorists a la "hunter" and "the turner diaries", which is extremely prophetic of today's largely unhappy-young-white-man school shooters, beginning with columbine that shares galring comparisons to the matrix and the "trenchcoat mafia" motif in that whole scenario.
The fims i thought of were:
Office space - a disgruntled middle-aged white office worker decides to steal money from his boss, gets hypnotised into becoming le epic apathetic guy, falls for anti-intellectualism from his neighbour's "simple ways". The office is burned down in a political symbol that returns man to hard labour, where our protagonist is now happy being a beer-drinking idiot. Its ironic since mike judge also made "idiocracy" but idiocracy itself is an extremely elitist criticism of democracy. So we can see a fascist connection.
Fight club - a disgruntled middle-aged white guy decides to destroy society because modern society is bullshit, so he becomes le epic based terrorist who smashes the credit system to return mankind to hard labour and suffering, because at least that's "real".
The matrix - disgruntled middle-aged white office worker becomes part of a crew that helps destroy the system by shooting up banks, fighting homeless people who are "agents of the system", where anyone can be an agent and by esteeming to litersl super powers from this cyber-misanthropy.
American beauty - disgruntled middle-aged white office worker fantasises about having sex with a high school student, so starts to "sepf-improve". He leaves his job and becomes le epic based apathetic guy who sees through all of society's bullshit.
Falling down - disgruntled middle-aged white office worker becomes a terrorist who starts fucking with people because he has a gun (he just becomes a nazi stormtrooper basically), he has no class enemy, but just hates everyone, from public sector workers to rich golfers. Here we see a populist message thst just gives license to mindless angst, where the system is not blamed but the actors within the system are scapegoated.
Like i say, i think the political dispossession of white people, particularly white men has become a very touchy neurosis which has led to this sort of mindset in america.
The idea in all these movies is to "start again" by smashing the system entirely. It is an anti-social anti-politics of revenge.
No.38693
This feels like bait because 2/3rds of this roster is either an analogy for capitalism and the base affecting the superstructure, or how a disgruntled middle aged man looking for a fantasy when life was simple and made sense ruins their life trying to shove everyone out of their way and leading a path of destruction for people around them.
No.38694
>>38693Its not "capitalism" thats the issue in these movies, as in exploitation. Its the decadence of "modern society" and office work as a type of "bullshit job". Thats why the message is to tear it down and start again. Which is fascist nostalgia.
No.38695
>>38692>I have noticed a trend in 90s cinema where a disgruntled middle-aged white office worker takes revenge on society by becoming le epic sociopath and/or apathetic dissident.I mean isn't that just
Falling Down or is there another movie like it?
No.38696
>>38693>sense ruins their life trying to shove everyone out of their way and leading a path of destruction for people around them.I feel like part of the problem or just a side effect of this is that a ton of people will just straight not care or miss that message entirely. Look at how a section of the audience will romanticize edgy anti-hero characters no matter what.
No.38697
>>38694It is capitalism, the decadence you speak of is either working a dead end job, buying abstract goods to fit in a social standing, getting stuck in traffic going to your job, or seeking emotionally vulnerable men to have a feelings jam with them. These are facets of society inescapably connected to capitalism, and tearing down society is also what is advocated for in socialist theory, literally revolution. YOU are what the movies are making fun of.
No.38698
>>38695I listed the ones i could think of:
Falling down
Office space
Fight club
American beauty
The matrix
No.38699
>>38697Socialism isnt about blowing up banks to revert people to the stone age
No.38700
>>38698>epic sociopath and/or apathetic dissident.This list would be a lot more limited if you had only put epic sociopath. You would have Falling Down and Fight Club. That's it. Office Space and American Beauty are more "apathetic dissident." And "The Matrix" is neither of these things. It's about humans being used as a source of energy by a ruthless hivemind machine and being kept asleep inside a computer simulation their whole lives. The main character wakes up from this simulation to live in the real life hellworld and must fight to free the other humans from their slumber. It's the opposite of apathy. Sure he starts off an apathetic white office worker, but that's the only similarity.
As for why this trend happened in the 1990s, it's easy to see. The USSR collapsed and it seemed from their Fukuyama-ass "end of history" perspective that it was just going to be neoliberal capitalism forever. Obviously that turned out to be untrue and history's back on the menu, but you had that sweet spot between 1991 and 2001 where American life really did feel like a simulation. No major enemies. No justification for that huge military budget. Most people snoozed through the intervention in Kosovo.
No.38701
>>38696Thats the point of the movies, to sew political discontent and show how based you can be if you stop giving a fuck about society. Its like how scorsese movies glorify gangsters but still have to add the "cautionary tale" stuff at the end.
No.38702
>>38698cont. from
>>38700, also it's only American box office hollywood cinema you're describing. Globally, cinema was a lot more diverse than this.
No.38703
>>38700Is history back on the menu? The ukraine and israel stuff just seems like more spectacle where whoever has the best ad campaigns wins the popularity contest with western voters
No.38704
>>38692The Matrix is literally an allegory for being trans 🏳️⚧️
No.38706
>>38699That's where you're wrong kiddo
No.38707
>>38706The final boss of anti-revisionism
No.38708
>>38692What a racist, retarded fucking take that completely and deliberately misinterprets these films. The only ones that can be considered reactionary would be Turner Diaries and Fight Club and even then, only because /pol/ missed the point of those films and instead worshipped the main character. Hell this entire thesis misuses the term reactionary, which in ideological meaning is the opposition to change and seeking a return to a status quo.
All of these misinterpretations are annoying but particularly this one
>Falling down - disgruntled middle-aged white office worker becomes a terrorist who starts fucking with people because he has a gun (he just becomes a nazi stormtrooper basically), he has no class enemy, but just hates everyone, from public sector workers to rich golfers.This is so WRONG that I can only conclude the OP is baiting. The entire film is about the utter disillusionment of the main character with his life, with life in America and the American dream. His job was essentially creating weapons to defend his home country. From an audience point of view he is a part of the military-industrial complex, but he sees it as helping to protect his country, yet that same country throws him away and fires him. He goes through his city meeting all sorts of assholes and instead of just accepting the fuck-over he'd get from these people in daily life, reacts like he wishes to and which feels right to him because he's tired of bullshit, tired of playing at false pleasantries, tired of accepting it and just wants to go home and see his daughter and wife. Hell he doesn't even realize that he scares his wife because of his controlling nature, a controlling nature that is a product of the very society he's grown to hate. It's not about ideologies, it's not reactionary because it's not opposing social reform, its simply a drama about D-Fens. As Roger Ebert put it, "the film… is actually about a great sadness which turns into madness, and which can afflict anyone who is told, after many years of hard work, that he is unnecessary and irrelevant."
So TL;DR: It's not about being white, or middle-aged or middle-class or any of that rubbish. It's about the alienation of American society driving a man over the edge.
No.38709
>>38700Agent smith is clearly mapped from his boss
The system is the architecture of his work environment, where he feels trapped in his cubicle, or pod.
Morpheus and trinity are online dissidents he meets on the internet where he "falls down the rabbit hole" of theory and dissatisfaction
The freedom he experiences at the end is becoming an ultimate hacker and being able to fight the system from above in cyberspace
Thats the analogy of the film
In the later films he becomes a member of zion, a rave scene that allows for free identity and sexual liberation
Then he meets the architect who tells him that he cannot defeat the system. In response they kill trinity, then he downloads himself into the system to destroy it from within. This is clearly a symbol of the ex-radical glowie who makes concessions to capital in order to give the system a "human face", like the machines have at the end.
This is the arresting of the system to faciality, in deleuzean terms. Now ofc the movies were inspired by baudrillard and his nihilism, and that is where the movies start and stop - at the admission that you cant defeat the matrix, but only make peace with it.
Its an anti-revolutionary series but with its important individualist tint, where you can become neo, as a simulated rebel. This is what all of the feds who drape themselves in nazi garb do and this is what school shooters do.
No.38710
in this thread we witness an intellectual battle between rainbow-fascists and actual socialists
No.38711
>>38708All films are ideological
And no, i dont think him going into a fast food place with an uzi threatening people is just a guy having a bad day, its a way for someone to feel powerful by bullying people under him
>>482475My point is that its in the perceived oppression of white people that leads to this sort of impotence. Mass shootings in america only started at the beginning of the civil rights movement.
No.38712
>>38711>All films are ideological It's not 2016 anymore, you can stop LARPing with this retarded ass take.
>i dont think him going into a fast food place with an uzi threatening people Thanks for completely and deliberately misinterpreting the scene and the context of what happened before it. Yes he most certainly had a bad fucking day and more LONG before getting to the Fast Food place, I think a drive-by shooting that killed innocent people alone would be quite something, it was for me. He also only threatens the manager of the place for being a fucking retard the refuses to just give him the food he asked for even though its RIGHT there and their only reason for refusing is some arbitrary social bullshit about breakfast and lunch time. This only gets stupider because the breakfast they were refusing to give was going to be tossed into the dumpster at the end of the day anyway, so what were they losing by just giving it to him. He doesn't go out of his way to bully other people, or the people in the Diner, he doesn't want to scare them at all, but he's clearly not in his right mind and just wants them to sit and keep eating - which is silly, but rational from his point of view.
No.38713
>>38712All films *are* ideological, or do you not even think there is subtext in movies?
No.38714
>>482478
>we need to shut the fuck down any narrative that white people are suffering under a *literal white supremacist* system
What a fucking retarded, racist, liberal take.
We do not live in a White Supremacist System, we do not live in a system of institutionalized racism, the problem is not fucking "whitey" and white proletarians most certainly have every right to state their suffering under the capitalist system they live in. Go fuck yourself, or better yet, go to Skid Row and tell all the white and black people suffering there that the lack people actually have it worse because individual racists still exist.
Go fuck yourself.
No.38715
>>38709ok but you're talking about 90s cinema. only the first movie is 90s cinema. and on its own it doesn't match
No.38716
>>38703history was never really off the menu. and as far as burgers were concerned it was back on the menu as soon as 9/11
No.38717
>>38713Ideology being IN a film does not make the film ideological. Star Wars A New Hope has a general rebellion vs fascist Empire story but it has no particular motifs outside of rebellion against fascism, that is not an ideology. Subtext is not the same thing as an ideology either. Like the OP misuses the term reactionary, you are misusing the term ideology. Falling Down also does not have an ideology, it's not promoting capitalism, it's not reactionary because it's not seeking to return a socio-economic status quo, it isn't advocating for fascism and most certainly reject Nazis, having the main character KILL one. It also does not promote racism, as D-Fens isn't discriminating against the black kids or Hispanics or anyone else. Hell, a black kid is who he asks for help in launching a LAW rocket, because the kid saw how it's done on TV. The movie is just simply as I said, a man depressed and alienated by both the capitalist socio-economic system and by his personal failings in life is driven over the edge over the course of the film and becomes more and more unhinged because of it. He's not a good guy, but a tragic result of the society he lives in and its the same for people regardless of race, sex or age, the only thing that matters is power; the rich are basically free to live untroubled, golfing and dicking around like the entitled pricks they are. The closest ideology I could possible gives this film is vaguely marxist, but even then more from a viewers point of view, with D-Fens being a reflection of inter-societal conflict with individuals that are a reflection of systemic ills, such as his rage out at the convenience store's mark-ups on prices, which is in my experience in retail, bullshit most of the time, but is also a result of how inflated item prices push you to make sold items more expensive than they ought to be, so while the store owner is an asshole, he's an asshole that is a product of the socio-economic system he is in, just like D-Fens is.
No.38719
>>38717>Ideology being IN a film does not make the film ideological. Whats the difference?
>The closest ideology I could possible gives this film is vaguely marxistI completely disagree but we can live and let live
No.38720
>>38715I am just riffing on the matrix by ironically breaking its gnostic illusion
No.38721
>>38716Well badiou considers 9/11 an "event"
But to me it is something shrouded in simulation, starting with its conspiratorial origins and its contrived place in american culture. It is like the *gap* that instituted the patriot act and initiated the iraq invasion, but in itself it is an absence
No.38722
>>38718"Mad God" (2021) was really good
No.38723
To ANYONE that tries to argue that "whites aren't oppressed under capitalism" or other anti-communist, undialectical takes like it I'mma put it simple:
If you wanna use the analogy that because Black People may be subject to more prejudice and socio-economic pressures by the nature of race and that invalidates their suffering, by that logic, no race or ethnicity on earth has any right to say a word to Slavs and Jews because of the Holocaust, including blacks, and said black people should pay reparations to Russia and Israel… That sounds fucking stupid, doesn't it, because suffering and oppression under capitalism and fascism isn't a dick-measuring contest, and one person suffering more than another does not invalidate the suffering of another. If (You) break a leg and another guy breaks 2 legs, does that mean your pain is not legitimate or that you can't empathize and understand the pain of the man who broke 2 legs? No.
Also the idea of racial profiling is outdated, cops harass and attack people regardless of race, but the idea of profiling is continued because it creates racial tensions and divides the working class. We're in this together, there's no point in picking a fight over artificially created divisions.
No.38724
>>38718this,
someone post Zizek talking about Fight Club
also if you give a shit about ideology in films please get a real job
No.38725
>>38723More Black people died from slavery than jews died during the Holocaust.
No.38726
>>38719>Whats the difference?An ideological film is a film being about a specific ideology. Just vague social critiques displays of its ills are not an ideology in itself. Also there are many films that are about mundane things without ideology, I don't think there's any real ideology to be found in children cartoon movies where the plots and ideas of "sharing is caring" and "treat others as you would like to be treated" are the motifs. These themes are included in some ideologies.
>we can live and let liveSure. I understand that his actions are psychotic, but that's why I bring up Ebert's quote, D-Fens went postal, and it's sad to see.
No.38729
>>38726>I don't think there's any real ideology to be found in children cartoon movies where the plots and ideas of "sharing is caring" and "treat others as you would like to be treated" are the motifs.Well it depends. But i'll just leave it there lol.
No.38730
>>38725 There are a many times fewer Jews than Africans in general. Regardless the number of Slavs and Jews killed by the Holocaust and Nazi executions numbers 6 million for the Jews and over 10 million for Slavic peoples, entire countries lost vast fractions of their populations. Even just keeping it to the Holocaust;
The total number of deaths directly attributable to the Middle Passage voyage is estimated at up to two million; a broader look at African deaths directly attributable to the institution of slavery from 1500 to 1900 suggests up to four million deaths. That's far fewer than Jews alone, let alone Slavs, and while the Africans died of starvation of being beaten to death, The Jews and Slavs were murdered in far more creative ways - slowly gassed to death choking on your melting lungs, vivisection, being burnt alive, testing the effects of overpressure on the internal organs, being hosed with freezing water and beaten with sticks until you had a heart-attack from shock or succumbed to your injuries, being stabbed, shot, hung, amputated, castrated, used as an organ donor, kept artificially alive until you had nothing left, electrocuted, drowned, tortured to death, hunted by hungry dogs, the list goes on, I'm not even talking about purely psychological torture methods also used by the Nazis.
My point remains, dick-measuring suffering is meaningless, it's a futile venture that capitalist ideology promotes because it sets proletarians against one another and creates hatred and mutual prejudice, which helps nobody.
No.38731
>>38692Most of these movies are anti-reactionary though, D-Fens is clearly the bad guy in Falling Down and that applies to most of the rest too
No.38732
falling down is about a reactionary but it doesn't really have anything to say about him
the main character isn't set up to be sympathetic but also there's no real alternative presented
No.38733
>>38731He's not a bad guy though, but he's not a hero either. The point is that we sympathize with him going off the rails but also understand that lashing out is not really going to end well.
No.38734
>>38727My point though would be that no one is more in the trap than someone who thinks theyre out of it. To take the red pill is to only go deeper into the dream. Jasun horsely has talked about this before in his ideas around "the second matrix" which is the psychedelic realm created by a parastic interface between man and the gaian mind, or plant-substances. His solution is to turn back to the body - to enter back into "real life".
It can be seen as heidegerian in this way.
No.38735
>>38732>theres no real alternative in the filmThats because its an anti-political movie
It says "society is bullshit, deal with it or chimp out"
No.38737
>>38692>The Matrix is reactionary>cyber-misanthropyTaking a highly symbolic movie which antagonist (Smith) was a raging misanthrope himself at face value is the most ignorant thing ever. The second movie gives some context to the first.
No.38738
>>38711>All films are ideologicalI mean, sure, because morality itself is ideological too, your brain is ideological because your brain is full of spooks.
It's all spooks. Everywhere.
No.38739
>>38726>An ideological film is a film being about a specific ideology. Just vague social critiques displays of its ills are not an ideology in itselfThis. Also, why is Mao the most chill of all the MLs? If I didn't know his politics I'd think he's an anarchist (and he kinda was before he changed his mind all of a sudden).
No.38740
>>38739 (me)
He kinda reminds me of Malatesta or Bakunin I think.
No.39305
>>38714Whats the majority of the race of rich people in the US. Not white supermacist lol
No.39326
>>39305>What is the majority race of rich people in the US <Gee billy, the majority of the US population is white and so are the majority of its rich people because of it, who'd have thunk ratios work like that!? >Not white supermacist lol 1) Go back to school and learn to write properly.
2) That is not, in fact, white supremacist. Go back to school and read an Encyclopedia.
No.39329
>fight club
>reactionary
It's a critique of the Fight Club and its toxic masculinity, alongside the themes of alienation within consumerist modern society. How did you not understand that that it was a critique?
>The idea in all these movies is to "start again" by smashing the system entirely.
Where do you think you are, reformist?
No.39330
>>39326black people are poorer by proportion also are more likely to be imprisoned
there's a bigger raw number of poor white people than poor black people, but if you're black you're more likely to be poor black people than a random white person has the the chance to be poor white people
No.39332
>>39330>black people are poorer by proportion also are more likely to be imprisoned White people make up 57.2% of inmates,
Blacks are 38.6% and Asians are 1.4%
By your contextless logic the USA is dominated by Asian Supremacy.
>if you're black you're more likely to be poorBecause of material conditions of African Americans leading up to current day, and if you're white you're ALSO likely to be poor and have little upward mobility, because of other material conditions leading up to current day.
Do you want to know why? Because it's not about race, it's about the upper class oppressing the lower class and hoarding wealth and power relative to the majority of ALL proletarians.
Finally go back to school and learn to write, your sentences are a fucking childish mess.
No.39333
>>39332>White people make up 57.2% of inmates, >Blacks are 38.6% and Asians are 1.4% >By your contextless logic the USA is dominated by Asian Supremacy. Not what I meant. What percentage of black people total are imprisoned and what percentage of white people total are imprisoned?
No.39334
>>39330If you cut off the top 10% of white people then poverty rates are the same.
No.39338
>>39333The number of convicted felons in the United States is roughly 8% of the population. Black individuals make up 19% of felony defendants, which is roughly 1-2 million people across the country a year, which is consistent with their demographic size. White individuals make up 50+% of the felony defendants and are also consistent with demographic size. The argument you are hinting at is not confirmed by actual statistics. The proletariat are the ones that go to jail, their race doesn't matter to the system, the media only says it does because controversy and racial tensions interfere with united people's movements.
No.39377
>>38726If only red guards tried to befriend and persuade political opponents instead of killing and even eating most of them.
No.40311
>ctrl-f white
>36 occurances
am i on reddit? whats going on?
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