“Gulag” has to remain a necessary shorthand for “the bad kind of prison that foreigners do”, because you can’t have people living in the state with earth’s highest prison population go around recognizing the conditions and class composition of their own prisons when they consume dystopian fiction.
Really highlights what atrocity propaganda is for beyond just manufacturing consent for war. It’s hard to complain about how violent and arbitrary yank cops are when the Evil CCP gestapo killed ten thousand peaceful protestors with machine gun fire in Tienanmen Square. Aren’t you glad you live in the Land Of The FreeTM?
It’s the whole capitalist realism thing. It’s fine to criticize the system as long as it’s understood that there is no alternative. Every other system is worse, so just suck it up and accept the horror of capitalism as your only option.
Remainds me of Polish book market, most of the books, even completely unrelated, at some points have the ritual condemnation of the demon of communism. It’s usually short from one sentence to half page, and often is completely at odds with the topic, for example some light romance with sudden “Soviet rapehorde” mention and then back to flirting, or jab at marxism during analysis of kingdom of Western Zhou.
Modern Russian WWII movies energy. It’s more subtle, of course, no rapehordes, but you can bet there will be a senselessly cruel officer(probably the political officer) and “the people won in spite of the system” energy. Thankfully, they keep reliably getting shit for it from the audience.
I read somewhere how anticapitalist media is often part of promotion of capitalism. "The system is bad, but it’s best of what’s available "
I was genuinely surprised how anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist Black Adam and Blue Beetle were few years ago, you really don’t expect it from usual superhero slop these days. I really wonder how can they make more similar movies to get past the usual Hollywood checkup on this stuff in order for it to be released, because they usually can’t or have to put shit like this if they want it to pass.
Minus the few exceptions, really disappointed with almost everything that came out last year, from Joker 2, through standard superhero slop and to top it off, usual showing of Eastern Europe as backward removed just Medieval.
*paid by & financed with strings by capitalism
(The invisible hand of “free market” is there to hold the poor by the balls.)Look at it this way - politicians, even the ones in power, always criticise the gov & affiliated systems too. It’s not the change that is rewarded, it’s keeping & refining the current system.
We have a single reward metric (monies), ofc that absolutely dictates the inevitable enshitification.
2nd time, in as many days, that i see a snowpiercer post; this place rocks!
Recuperation.
What do you mean?
In the sociological sense, recuperation is the process by which politically {revolutionary} ideas and images are twisted, co-opted, absorbed, defused, incorporated, annexed or commodified within {capitalist} media{'s} culture {/} bourgeois society, and thus become interpreted through a neutralized, innocuous or more socially conventional {ruling-class} perspective
To play devils advocate and because i like this guys films… there is a reason the gulag system was abolished, some of them were pretty fucking bad. And also gulag has a common meaning which is beyond the reality of what they actually were, it would be careless to use it this way as a leftist but a reasonable mistake.
And also gulag has a common meaning which is beyond the reality of what they actually were, it would be careless to use it this way as a leftist but a reasonable mistake.
I don’t think we necessarily need to judge whether the individuals involved made a mistake or not; at least for a project of that scale anyway, I’m not sure how meaningful it is to try to work it out on that level. Ultimately, the end result is the same that a lot of anti-capitalist media gets watered down in one way or another. They (the capitalists) don’t want people to believe that better is possible as an actual detailed vision that has been proven to work and has a scientific process behind it. Usually the closest you get in a story is vague allusions to working toward better after busting up the establishment.
You also have to remember that this is a couple seasons in. Their capitalist masters are going to insist that the leftism be taken down a notch or two. I thought that Snowpiercer remained pretty good throughout the show though. The last season is a pretty nice jab at NATO.
For contrast, look at the tragedy that was For All Mankind. It starts out with Americans whinging about losing the race to the moon, and follows up with getting their asses kicked in human rights. A couple seasons later, they’re saying that poor people don’t exist in Vietnam because the government killed them all, and showing the evil communist hardliners fighting peaceful beloved Gorbachev. I stopped watching at that point.
ima be real with u i didnt even know there was a snowpircer tv show i thought this was about the movie, i thought it looked a bit weird but it has been a while since i saw the movie so i thought i was just forgetting things.
Also yeah For All Mankind completely fucking lost its mind after a while, i also had to stop watching it half way thru, for me it was the show trying to make me give a shit about the veteran guy’s struggle with the fact that he almost faced consequences for being a murderer in Korea, and talking about gulags it drove me nuts that they had russian guy tell an african american woman about how bad gulags are, years after the gulag system had already been abolished, just pure projection and delusion.
I just rewatched the movie and I forgot how good it was. It leaves you feeling angry all the way throughout. Is the show any good despite the expected lib slop like in the screenshot?
