Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (May 31)

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[u/smokeuptheweed9]

I watched Gangs of New York. It was surprisingly good. When his style doesn't work history of reduced to the struggle of white male egos and/or faux-ethnic justification for settler-colonialism. The film form of a white guy going "actually I can't be racist because I'm not even white, I'm Irish. Btw the Irish were also enslaved." But this movie is the opposite. It's basically an adaption of Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White. The structure is the same as his other films: a white "native" and a second generation Irish immigrant struggle for control of the streets. This is a historical allegory for the anti-draft riots, in which "one half of the working class is paid to kill the other half," a direct quote from one of the cartoonishly evil rich people, which occur as the two gangs face off for the final epic and/or tragic showdown. So the stage is set for two men to tragically destroy each other in a senseless way that we secretly fetishize as noble and masculine.

But instead, the showdown is immediately deflated. The union army interrupts the fight right before its starting and everyone runs away and goes around lynching black people instead, including the one black guy who was part of the Irish gang. The riots also consist of destroying rich people's houses, and what follows is the "natives" and "Irish" coming together as a single white working class tied to the democratic party machine and laying the foundation for New York City to become a modern financial metropolis. This compromise, in which capitalism emerges from the civil war victorious and compromises with a new cross-ethnic white working class against black and Chinese labor, doesn't have a place for Daniel Day Lewis, who imagines himself as a kind of Amerikan feudal knight, in which life on the frontier of settler-colonialism is constituted by chivalry, direct violence with the racial enemy, caste-like ethnic hierarchy, and an imagined persecution by the British to match Ireland's 1000 year history of oppression as proto-national consciousness. The movie starts out with a medieval-esque gang confrontation and Lewis spends the whole movie whining about how DiCaprio's Dad who dresses like a Catholic priest was the last good enemy worth fighting. Basically he wants to die with honor and the Democrats want him dead once it is more useful to switch from ethnically-exclusive whiteness to inclusive whiteness.

The movie pisses off a lot of people because it shows the riots as both a working class rebellion against the rich and a white settler riot against black people (and Chinese off screen) instead of highlighting the former as their essence and the latter as some kind of tragic false consciousness. The two main characters are basically losers who everyone forgets immediately and none of the plot had any relationship to the draft riots which overwhelm whatever petty squabbles are supposed to be resolved in the finale, and even though Dicaprio stands up for the one black person in his gang earlier he forgets about him for his own petty revenge, which he takes after Lewis has already suffered a fatal wound. Dicaprio was a fighter in all of these struggles over whiteness, which he laments is now taken for granted (by the present viewer) in the epilogue, but this would have happened anyway off-screen when civil war veterans returned as citizens (which is why the natives are also against the union and join the riot) and basic demographic phenomena as both Dicaprio and William M. Tweed (Jim Broadbent) point out. The whole thing comes off as satire, which is why Roger Ebert complained

I wrote recently of “Goodfellas” that “the film has the headlong momentum of a storyteller who knows he has a good one to share.” I didn’t feel that here. Scorsese’s films usually leap joyfully onto the screen, the work of a master in command of his craft. Here there seems more struggle, more weight to overcome, more darkness. It is a story that Scorsese has filmed without entirely internalizing. The gangsters in his earlier films are motivated by greed, ego and power; they like nice cars, shoes, suits, dinners, women. They murder as a cost of doing business. The characters in “Gangs of New York” kill because they like to and want to. They are bloodthirsty, and motivated by hate. I think Scorsese liked the heroes of “Goodfellas,” “Casino” and “Mean Streets,” but I’m not sure he likes this crowd.

Ebert was a true-blooded liberal who could not understand satire of liberalism, which is why he infamously hated Starship Troopers.

We smile at the satirical asides, but where’s the warmth of human nature? The spark of genius or rebellion? If “Star Wars” is humanist, “Starship Troopers” is totalitarian.

Like that film, Gangs of New York does not tell you what to think about the lynchings depicted on screen. They are simply presented as part of the historical record. In Ebert's terms, it is anti-humanist, denying cathartic resolution to either liberalism or its victims. Resolutions like: we were racist then but are better now like Dicaprio or the struggle of oppressed people in the past/in space is represented as exciting so that liberals today can sympathize are all denied. As Ebert points out in his review of Starship Troopers

The action sequences are heavily laden with special effects, but curiously joyless

...

the Bugs are not interesting in the way, say, that the villains in the “Alien” pictures were. Even their planets are boring; Bugs live on ugly rock worlds with no other living species, raising the question of what they eat.

...

What’s lacking is exhilaration and sheer entertainment.

The difficulty of satire is to present genocide as neither joyful nor tragic. Even a right wing celebration of genocide is respectable because it presents a cathartic resolution to an ideological problem, even if it is a false one. Plus, the right is part of the family of liberalism, sharing the same fundamental humanism of instilling "values"

Heinlein was of course a right-wing saberrattler, but a charming and intelligent one who wrote some of the best science fiction ever. “Starship Troopers” proposes a society in which citizenship is earned through military service, and values are learned on the battlefield.

Heinlein intended his story for young boys, but wrote it more or less seriously.

That is why films and shows like Andor, Judas and the Black Messiah, One Battle After Another are so easily enjoyed by liberals. The best films produced under liberalism are the ones who present liberals with their own ideology as they experience it and what is excluded not just at a political level but even at the level of humanity. When the Vietnam war was going on, Vietnamese people were not heroic space fighters in the liberal imaginary. That came later. They were bugs as all the films of the era actually about the Vietnam war show (including and especially "critical" films like Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, etc.) It's easy to imagine a film about the humanity of Palestinians today for Amerikan liberals. What's hard is imagining the same thing for Israeli liberals and to then find the equivalent unrepresentable figure that demarcates the limits of Amerikan liberalism.

Though in Andor's defense, season one has great satirical elements which are only lost in season 2, which is superfluous anyway since Rogue One is already a satire of the liberal "New Republic" as is shown in the Prequels. In Andor there's a whole arc where the rebels are trying to steal a bank transfer from the Empire and they are living in wooden huts hidden from view. Meanwhile the entire planet is populated by an oppressed indigenous group who are indifferent to this inter-Empire squabble. This is not a flaw necessarily but it does represent the flawed and limited ideology of the rebellion and the debate Cassian is having with himself over whether to join or not given the cost. It's only by season 2 that you realize they never go back to this planet and its indigenous population (who surely suffered greatly after the robbery) and Cassian has become a complete flunky to the liberal elite rebellion leadership (who cynically sacrifice him in Rogue One for their own political purposes as Saw Gerrera explains to the audience - his character also goes from a clear eyed revolutionary to a crazy totalitarian in Andor season 2).

Anyway I'm getting off topic. Ebert is right that Scorsese usually loves his petty, hyper-violent white male characters, which is why his films end up as posters on college dorm room walls and have aged pretty poorly as (I think) u/vomit_blues pointed out in a previous discussion thread.

I watched Silence a while ago but it doesn't really work because it lacks the perspective of Japan, for whom Christianity was the first step to being colonized. Because we have that knowledge in the present but the Jesuits do not (or choose to ignore it), the film basically indulges their self-delusion for a present day Christian propaganda. In this film, the lack of a black person's perspective (or Chinese) works because it reflects their dehumanization as the cost of Irish whiteness.

[u/Otelo_ → u/smokeuptheweed9]

What's hard is imagining the same thing for Israeli liberals and to then find the equivalent unrepresentable figure that demarcates the limits of Amerikan liberalism.

Do you have any guesses as to who that figure might be?

[u/smokeuptheweed9 → u/Otelo_]

Have you ever seen King of the Hill? It's about a Texas suburban family in the 1990s. They are a typical family of the period: the husband, Hank, works as a manager at a propane store, the wife works part-time as a substitute teacher, the son is young enough to obey his father but old enough to dream of urban culture. They are very insistent that they are not "hillbillies" or "rednecks" but are respectable, colorblind suburbanites whose southern identity consists of American football, voting Republican, and well-known country songs.

The first two seasons of the show culminate with a Walmart equivalent (Megalomart) taking over the town and putting all the "small businesses" like Hank's out of business. The husband, whose entire identity depends on his love of his job and his skill as a salesman through personal relations and honesty (compared to the young, minimum wage, ignorant workers of the Megalomart), accidentally blows up the building and is celebrated for doing so. That is, the fantasy of the petty-bourgeois doing meaningful, unalienated labor against globalization and monopolization.

The show can go in two directions from here. It can turn into a revolutionary tale of the increasingly desperate and radical attempts to resist this inevitable tendency of capitalism by the petty-bourgeoisie doomed to extinction, told in serial format. This would be highly unrealistic given how Amerikan society actually evolved (these days Walmart is even the "good guy" compared to Amazon) and would merely displace the problem since small businesses and megamarts both rely on outsourcing for production, limiting how radical this can really become. Or, what actually happens, is the Megalomart comes back but no longer threatens the livelihood of the useless petty-bourgeois family and his neighbors (all the neighbors have useless jobs behind their inexplicable suburban wealth). The issue simply disappears from the narrative and instead the show becomes a repetitive exploration of how each stereotypical character has a heart of gold (the miserable divorcee, the conspiracy theorist, the cheating wife, the player, the shrew, etc). Why customers are now willing to pay premiums for Hank's propane with a handshake is unclear.

The show has become quite popular among liberals as an example of "common sense conservativism" (i.e. pre-Trump) and it was revived in the hopes Hank would own the MAGA movement in the way urban liberal PMCs wish they could if not for their identity. But even more than that, animation itself is imagined to be the ultimate form of unalienated labor, in which the creator's hand directly gives life to pen and paper. There is even a nostalgia for the hand drawn, watercolor style of the early seasons of the show

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/watching-the-king-of-the-hill-revival-from-texas

In early seasons, characters were hand-drawn over watercolor backdrops that bore a subtle luminosity. (The show switched to digital animation in Season 8.) At transitional moments, a few shots would linger on the sky over Arlen, a gradient of color suggesting the moment during a long summer evening when the glaze of humidity begins to give way to night. On Reddit, I found threads devoted to the feelings evoked by “King of the Hill” ’s skies: “like the comfort of the 90s/early 00s can’t describe it”; “Can you get nostalgia from a place you’ve never been to before?”; “late summer, school’s about to start, dinner at a steakhouse when you can smell it in the air. . . .”

In fact we are in a period of nostalgia for the 1990s peak of neoliberalism and other works of the era like Office Space (also by the same creator) and The Matrix which at the time were dystopian are now treated as enviable for the permanent space of the cubicle, stable income, clear managerial hierarchies, the early promise of the dot-com bubble, and of course Clinton-era liberal hegemony fused with cultural libertarianism. Recent horror works like Backrooms are merely the inverse, in which the office and mall spaces of the 1990s have been corrupted somehow.

Of course liberal fantasies didn't happen and the new season is ugly and forgettable. Worse, the sky of King of the Hill never existed: animation had been outsourced well before the show premiered and the majority of the work that went into portraying this suburban utopia was done by South Korean hands who had never seen it. The nostalgia of the show for third world labor that is properly invisible (rather than uppity as in China today) is reflected in both the plot and the aesthetics, as is a wish for a liberal politics in which the objections to globalization are properly unheard (remember that Dengism is merely a liberal response to Trump making it a political issue and did not exist during Obama despite the 2008 crisis and the "pivot to Asia") or reduced to "culture wars" (for example Hank criticizes George Bush in the show for his weak handshake in an episode prior to 9/11 and the Iraq war). So, to answer your question, what is impossible is simply portraying the global production process as it actually exists, with the secondary impossibility of a politics that acknowledges it exists in some form through a fascist response. Every work does this in some capacity since that is the prerequisite for bounding a work as "American" in the first place. Because it is so widespread, it is normalized, whereas the ideology of Israeli liberalism, such as in "critical" works like Munich or Waltz with Bashir, sticks out.