Author: Andrew Stewart

  • The Last Emperor, 1987 Dir. Bernardo Bertolucci. Starring John Lone, Joan Chen, Peter O’Toole. Now streaming on The Criterion Channel. The Bertolucci of 1900—where the liberated peasants of Emilia dance beneath a great red banner, and the director seems to be tracing his own radical progress—has moved on, outliving so much hope and disappointment. -David More

    The post 35 Years of the Last Emperor appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Song, A Journey. Dirs. Dan Geller, Dana Goldfine, Sony Pictures Classics, 2022. Now Available on Streaming and Blu Ray/DVD. Could there be any other way to make a musical documentary about Leonard Cohen’s life and work than one focused upon “Hallelujah,” a song which took on a life of its own More

    The post Can We Say “Hallelujah” About the New Leonard Cohen Documentary? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Four years after the release of the record-shattering first Black Panther movie, and two years after the unexpected death of the original film’s star Chadwick Boseman, Disney/Marvel bring us the inevitable sequel. Rather than recast the protagonist, King T’Challa, aka the Black Panther, dies offscreen in the opening five minutes. From there, his sister Princess More

    The post Wakanda Forever: Imperial Apologia in Kente Cloth appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Image by David Holifield.

    What was the US response to the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews? Too little too late, says this latest Ken Burns documentary. While it is hard to disagree with this estimation, the production simultaneously fails to clearly enunciate important lessons for our contemporary political landscape, something no amount of somber klezmer music can overpower.

    To read this article, log in here or subscribe here.

    If you are logged in but can’t read CP+ articles, check the status of your access here

    In order to read CP+ articles, your web browser must be set to accept cookies.

    More

    The post Ken Burns and the Holocaust appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Prefatory Note, 2022: Last spring, after almost a decade, I rewatched the first two entries in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, films which were quite dear to me during a very rough patch in high school. I quickly realized why I still enjoy the first film, Fellowship of the Ring, while finding its More

    The post On Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Alt-Right Trolls, and Racism in JRR Tolkein’s Writings appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

  • Dr. Gerald Horne, who hold the the Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, maintains his high-velocity writing pace with a new volume about the founding of the Lone Star State, The Counter-Revolution of 1836: Texas Slavery & Jim Crow and the Roots of U. S. Fascism from International […]

    To read this article, log in here or subscribe here.

    If you are logged in but can’t read CP+ articles, check the status of your access here

    In order to read CP+ articles, your web browser must be set to accept cookies.

    More

    The post Gerald Horne on the Counterrevolution of 1836 appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Authors’ Foreword, 2021 I originally authored this column in August 2015, back when Donald Trump was merely a television caricature parading his wares about the Obama Birther conspiracy theory and Hillary Clinton’s election seemed absolutely certain. Hindsight is always 20/20 and affords the film critic a certain pause not afforded other journalists. Films change over More

    The post The Coming End of Contraception appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Christopher Hitchens reading his book Hitch-22 (2010)

    At the outset, I admit that this review of a 160 page book is excessively long. Why exert this much time on a book that doesn’t even contain footnotes and outright admits its major mode of engagement was watching old YouTube video debates featuring the subject?

    Answer: Despite the utter failure of the volume to make a viable argument for Hitchens’ utility in radical politics, what caused his neocon turn, or even shed light on his contributions, the late polemicist remains a useful tool for liberal imperialists and outright reactionaries. On the anniversary of his death, former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter wrote a fawning tribute that in many ways is indistinguishable from the purple prose of this current volume. Matthew Continetti of the American Enterprise Institute likewise wrote a reverential tribute. Hitchens remains a useful propaganda tool via his seemingly-endless Hitch-Slap videos on YouTube. Also, obvious from the testimonials page at the front of the book, apparently there are people in DSA who have fondness for him. Why?

    There are many ways to parse this book, just as there are many ways to parse its subject. Adulatory reviews of this title have previously granted Ben Burgis, a philosophy professor and leading advocate of the Jacobin magazine tendency within the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the tacit acknowledgement of legitimacy to both his interrogative stance, predicated upon philosophy, and the intellectual validity of the inquiry, that Hitchens had a deep level of thought and political grounding.

    To read this article, log in here or subscribe here.

    In order to read CP+ articles, your web browser must be set to accept cookies.

    More

    The post Give Them A Migraine! Fan-boy Ben Burgis Slobbers over Christopher Hitchens appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • The first two decades of the comic book superhero film renaissance were definitely a mixed bag. Kicked off in the summer of 2000 with Bryan Singer’s X-Men and rapidly followed by Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002) and Ang Lee’s Hulk (2003), the genre was reborn from the ashes of the Batman and Superman franchises, which had More

    The post Spider-Man: Doxing, Security Culture and Web-Slinging appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Rep. Patricia Morgan, a state legislator and Rhode Island Republican Party leader who previously has run for Governor, made national headlines in the last week of December for Tweeting some undeniably racist blather that is to be expected from the Trumpkin patch: I had a black friend. I liked her and I think she liked More

    The post The True Problem With the GOP’s Patricia Morgan appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Ben Burgis has decided to publish a new book about Christopher Hitchens and the early signs are not good. His public statements seem to indicate he has the notion of actually interrogating Hitchens as a genuine intellectual. He wasn’t, he was a constant plagiarist. His works on Kissinger lifted passages by Edward Herman and Noam More

    The post Another Look at Christopher Hitchens? Why Ben Burgis, Why? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • As a longtime sci-fi cult classic, Frank Herbert’s 1965 space opera Dune is ranked with The Lord of the Rings as a cornerstone of its genre. The size and scope of the two are similar and led many to believe that they were both unfilmable. Now, nearly twenty years after The Fellowship of the Ring’s More

    The post Why Hollywood Sucks: Third Time’s a Charm with “Dune”? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • The great Black radical broadcaster and polemicist Glen Ford has left us and the airwaves will be sadder for it. Much will be said by his comrades, friends, and other Black radicals more versed in the tradition. But I think one item that might be missed otherwise was his unfailing Leninism. The first public reaction More

    The post Glen Ford ¡Presente! appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • For the past six years, the liberal-progressives who persist in trying to change the Democratic Party “from the inside” after almost 50 years of resounding failure (McGovern, Jesse Jackson, Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich, et. al. ad infinitum) have been bragging about reaching a pinnacle of success following the Bernie Sanders 2015-16 presidential campaign. This has More

    The post Medicare For All, the Squad and the DSA: Who Controls Whom? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • It might strike some as odd to claim one of the most eagerly-anticipated films of 2021 was originally formulated as an Objectivist epic. Shock might be further compounded upon learning that this film exists thanks to a grassroots campaign not featuring the usual suspects from the Libertarian milieu (Ron Paul supporters, bow-tied dweebs of the Cato Institute/Tucker Carlson mold, operatives within the Koch network, Reason Magazine subscribers and AntiWar.com readers) but instead regular comic book fans, whose politics are normally more progressive-leaning owing to the social democratic inclinations of the genre’s heavyweight publishers, enterprises founded by interwar New York Jewish-American entrepreneurs steeped in (though not necessarily actively engaged in) the Old Left cultural milieu.

    And yet here we are, one year into an extremely weird annum that seems to oftentimes reflect Objectivism’s worst implications, and Zack Snyder’s Justice League has plopped into our midsts.

    The film’s plot is the same as the previous iteration released four years ago. After the death of Superman, Bruce Wayne races to build the Justice League, including Wonder Woman, the Flash, Cyborg, Aquaman, and eventually a resurrected Kryptonian. Their major antagonist is Steppenwolf, an extra-terrestrial with magnificent strength and abilities that is seeking to gain control of and then unite three Mother Boxes in service of a larger scheme that was intended to branch across two Justice League sequels that now may never be actually produced but (confoundingly) were foreshadowed in not one but two films. The major difference in the picture boils down to tone, length, and magnanimity.

    Prior to any serious engagement on a textual and critical level with the motion picture in question, it behooves me to open with an acknowledgement of the concrete realities underwriting the cinematic auteur at hand. Recall the following exchange from a Congressional hearing on October 23, 2008.

    REP. HENRY WAXMAN (D-California): The question I have for you is, you had an ideology, you had a belief that free, competitive — and this is your statement — “I do have an ideology. My judgment is that free, competitive markets are by far the unrivaled way to organize economies. We’ve tried regulation. None meaningfully worked.” That was your quote.

    You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others. And now our whole economy is paying its price. Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?

    FMR. FEDERAL RESERVE CHAIR ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, remember that what an ideology is, is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to — to exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not. And what I’m saying to you is, yes, I found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is, but I’ve been very distressed by that fact.

    WAXMAN: You found a flaw in the reality…

    GREENSPAN: Flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak.

    WAXMAN: In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working?

    GREENSPAN: That is — precisely. No, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I had been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.

    Alan Greenspan, originally appointed to the Fed Chair by Ronald Reagan and kept in that position by three successive administrations, became an acolyte of quack philosopher Ayn Rand in the early 1950s, a friendship that lasted until the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged died. He made Randian Objectivism hegemonic in the halls of American (and therefore worldwide unipolar) economic governance.

    Less than 20 years later, the world economy cataclysmically imploded because of the Fed’s refusal to regulate any part of the market, including the highly-volatile derivatives that pierced the housing bubble of the late ‘aughts. We can draw a direct tautological line from the Objectivist Fed to the increase of “deaths of despair” such as the opioids crisis, the ascendancy of the Tea Party and later Donald Trump, and any number of other horrors over the past thirteen years. If it were not so frighteningly true, the super-villain Alan Greenspan and his evil fortress at the Federal Reserve would have been laughed out of a comic book publisher’s office in 1975 for sounding so extremely hyperbolic it beggared belief from authors known for mundane characters like the gaia-gobbling Galactus and a Speedo-sporting walking pile of gravel known as Thing.

    All this bears mentioning because Justice League director Zack Snyder is an Objectivist. Over the past twenty years, he has adapted a series of comic titles, including Frank Miller’s 300, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, and now a trilogy featuring Superman, Batman, and the larger Justice League, that mask Randian fantasia under the auspices of “gritty realism.” While the recent three-picture adaptation of Atlas Shrugged (thankfully) failed miserably at the box office, Snyder’s DC Comics films apparently have done more than a quality adaptation of Rand’s dreary novels could ever hope to. The filmmaker has created a high-demand Objectivist action film franchise, a Promethean feat for the hard right of American politics.

    This is by no means a de facto outcome from adaptation of the DC Comics pantheon. Richard Donner and Christopher Reeve created a Superman that clearly exemplified the values of Jewish-American socialism in the 1970s, inflected through a New Left lens that included sharp emphasis upon feminist, environmental, and anti-militarist values. (The first film is a thorough indictment of land speculation and exploitative rentier economics while the final picture features the Man of Steel tossing the entire worldwide nuclear weapon supply into the sun!)

    Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher both portrayed Batman as a psychologically-complicated vigilante whose post-traumatic survivor’s guilt catalyzed an aspiration towards crimefighting. Both filmmakers, in their own ways, queered their storylines and characters, delivering tacit indictments of normative cis-/hetero-sexism that baffled and repulsed pubescent teens inculcated by Reagan-era puritanism.

    The long-running animated television franchises, beginning with Bruce Timm, Paul Dini, and Mitch Brian’s groundbreaking Batman: The Animated Series, grappled with heavy ethical, existential, and political questions about the liberal democratic social contract during Fukuyama’s supposed decade-long “end of history.”

    Since the latter half of the 1980s, DC Comics films and television shows leaned in a distinctly liberal-progressive direction, partially due to the influence of its longtime crosstown rival Marvel Comics, whose titles more openly discussed the Civil Rights movement and other elements of the Culture War, and partially as a result of ideological aftershocks of the Reagan-Bush era. The Warner Bros. animation franchises, some of which were heavily-financed by Democratic Party fundraising luminary Steven Spielberg, had a distinct aspiration to shift the cultural discourse “from the inside,” reflecting many of the multicultural dreams of Clinton-loving liberals and Gramscian social democrats who imagined the first post-Soviet American presidency as one that might exploit the peace dividend in a positive fashion.

    But then things changed because of two significant developments.

    First was the release of Christopher Nolan’s 2005 blockbuster Batman Begins, a film with a distinct strain of regressive neoliberalism. Nolan purged the protagonist of all those weirdo psychological tics and oddities, transforming him into a paragon of normativity. While Michael Keaton had an undeniable rubber and leather fetish, most pronounced in his haunting courtship of Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman (sporting a costume that would make Foucault envious), Christian Bale looked like he fit naturally onto a Forbes magazine cover. His romances were utterly heterosexual ones with partners embodying stereotypical white middle class Clinton-style feminism and his opponents were aberrations in the neoliberal social contract, one wherein Bruce Wayne and Wayne Enterprises were positioned as the valiant charitable benefactors of a state that was hopelessly corrupt, deficient, and obstructing progress. To borrow a phrase from Ralph Nader, this is a Gotham City where only the super-rich can save us.

    In 2006, the death knell came for these superheroic politics with Brian Singer’s pitiful Superman Returns. The director’s hyper-obsession with the Donner-Reeves franchise led him to Quixotically attempt a quasi-reboot/tribute/time traveling transplant of the older films. He failed follow the lead of Donner, who had breathed fresh air into the story with a character that was both a postmodern, self-referential spoof of the source material’s hammiest bits (Reeve’s portrayal always worked best when there was an implied wink-and-nod at the audience about how ridiculous the proceedings were, a Pynchon-esque picaresque deflating the underlying fascistic elements of the incarnate Übermensch narrative) and had an epic stature that reached for De Mille-like grandeur (Mario Puzo’s story, written when the author was riding high on The Godfather’s popularity, nears Homeric proportions when the Last Son of Krypton literally reverses the earth’s rotation to turn back time). Instead, audiences were given a strange homage that tried to impose a story that carried a distinct 1970s time-stamp into the 21st century, the cinematic equivalent of a classic rock performer onstage well past their prime who is blissfully unaware of their painful ontological self-parody. The results were calamitous.

    Superheroic social democratic politics were dead. Instead, the money had gone for a film starring an actor who, only a few years before in American Psycho, had (in an ironic turn the fans could call a retcon) shown how morally bankrupt such a reified and valorized political economy was. This was passed off as “gritty realism” by the Warner Bros. marketing department but in fact it is a deeply-defined endorsement of an ideology that has caused demonstrable harm to the globe over the past thirty-five years. While Nolan’s neoliberalism was a mainstream British Blairite New Labor flavor, Snyder’s was even more grotesque and reactionary.

    In her valuable 2019 polemic Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed, Dr. Lisa Duggan asks:

    How can the work of this one novelist (also an essayist, playwright, and philosopher), however influential, be a significant source of insight into the rise of a culture of greed? In a word: sex. Ayn Rand made acquisitive capitalists sexy. She launched thousands of teenage libidos into the world of reactionary politics on a wave of quivering excitement. This sexiness extends beyond romance to infuse the creative aspirations, inventiveness, and determination of her heroes with erotic energy, embedded in what Rand called her “sense of life.” Analogous to what Raymond Williams has called a “structure of feeling,” Rand’s sense of life combines the libido-infused desire for heroic individual achievement with contempt for social inferiors and indifference to their plight…

    Rand’s contrasting sense of life applies to those whose fantasies of success and domination include no doubt or guilt. The feelings of aspiration and glee that enliven Rand’s novels combine with contempt for and indifference to others. The resulting Randian sense of life might be called “optimistic cruelty.” Optimistic cruelty is the sense of life for the age of greed. Ayn Rand’s optimistic cruelty appeals broadly and deeply through its circulation of familiar narratives: the story of “civilizational” progress, the belief in American exceptionalism, and a commitment to capitalist freedom.

    Her novels engage fantasies of European imperial domination conceived as technological and cultural advancement, rather than as violent conquest. America is imagined as a clean slate for pure capitalist freedom, with no indigenous people, no slaves, no exploited immigrants or workers in sight… Their logic also depends on a hierarchy of value based on racialized beauty and physical capacity—perceived ugliness or disability are equated with pronounced worthlessness and incompetence.

    Through the forms of romance and melodrama, Rand novels extrapolate the story of racial capitalism as a story of righteous passion and noble virtue. They retell The Birth of a Nation through the lens of industrial capitalism. They solicit positive identification with winners, with dominant historical forces. It is not an accident that the novels’ fans, though gender mixed, are overwhelmingly white Americans of the professional, managerial, creative, and business classes.

    Perhaps I might buttress this with a point raised by graphic novelist Alan Moore, who said in an interview “Save for a smattering of non-white characters and non-white creators, these books and these iconic characters are still very much white supremacist dreams of the master race. In fact, I think that a good argument can be made for D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as the first American superhero movie, and the point of origin for all those capes and masks.” (Ironically, Moore’s famous Rorschach, the antihero of Watchmen, was intended as a pitch-black spoof of Randian Objectivism, a point that apparently escaped Snyder when he directed the film adaptation, perhaps suggesting the auteur is either an idiot or a sociopathic narcissist par excellence.)

    If we refract the film projector showcasing Zack Snyder’s trilogy of DC Comics adaptations through this lens, a truly troubling analysis emerges. Contra the norm of the Marvel films, which by and large have been rather bland action-comedies, Snyder opted for an ultra-serious quasi-Wagnerian soap opera about our heroes as archetypical deities walking among the living. (It is not accidental that he selected as the antagonists a set of creations authored by the legendary Jack Kirby literally named The New Gods, led by the universe-conquering Darkseid, who is intent on gaining control of something called “the Anti-Life Equation” that can grant the bearer control of everyone’s minds, including even Superman.) Rand was not shy about pointing out her affinity for Nietzsche and the fascistic tendencies her thoughts align with, though her apostolic apologists plead that her Russian Jewish heritage (somehow) inoculates her from such critiques. (The neoconservative book critic Whittaker Chambers once quipped “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber — go!’”)

    There is an ironic consequence to all this, however. The “gritty realism” is quite obviously an antithesis to the campy and sometimes openly-parodic nature of the earlier Superman and Batman pictures, epitomized when Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin (1997) seemed throughout its entire runtime to be doubling as a high-budget tacitly-gay romantic comedy informed by Warhol’s aesthetics.

    But by veering so far in the opposite direction, creating an utterly humorless universe, Snyder, whose style is so bombastic and self-important to write its own rebuttals upon viewing (witness the plethora of internet memes derived from his earlier films), inadvertently creates a film that cannot be called anything but ridiculous. The Justice League title and its predecessor, The Justice Society of America, were not authored by some visionary Homer-like poet at DC Comics. Instead, both were originally developed and published as the most narratively-shallow cash cows by editors and publishers responding to epistles from child readers who wrote “GO DO MAKE SUPERMAN FIGHT BATMAN BOOM!” What kind of standard can you possibly erect for such a project? How would one evaluate a cinematic adaptation of Moby Dick wherein Ishmael is played by Popeye and Ahab by Bluto?

    Subtlety is as foreign to Snyder’s misé en scene as humor and the results are so exhausting you cannot help laughing at the sheer lunacy of his pretensions. (Anyone familiar with the differences between Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather and the tawdry pulp source novel will understand that this is not exactly an unfamiliar dynamic for American cinema.) After the tenth Riefenstahl-referencing slow-motion action shot, complete with enough testosterone to power an entire professional wrestling Pay-Per-View special as part of its implicit Cult of the Body, the campiness is impossible to avoid.

    For mature viewers, this creates a sort of reflexively voyeuristic impulse, akin to watching a slow-motion car accident or reruns of the 2016 presidential debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, so obscene and grotesque one cannot turn away. But for the general public, easily conned by Rand’s grift and Snyder’s hyperbolic hyper-macho hypnosis, one cannot help to worry about what impact this might have in the body politic.

    The film itself is a strange case of the Director’s Cut, which says something for a sub-genre composed of some of the most counterintuitive moments in cinema history. Snyder originally signed on for a three-picture deal, delivering the lugubrious Man of Steel (2013) and then Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), whose titular resemblance to a civil tort perfectly reflects what a migraine the viewing was. While producing Justice League, Warners executives began to push back against the increasingly-nihilistic edge of the series, which had alienated fans and lowered subtotals on box office receipts. (I fondly remember a bilious, apoplectic negative review by my former colleague/former comic book store owner Steve Ahlquist of the latter picture.) When the director’s daughter tragically passed away, he and his wife, producer Deborah Snyder, gracefully stepped aside and surrendered post-production to Joss Whedon. The longtime wunderkind of American nerd culture had been a significant creative force in the rival Marvel Cinematic Universe, including directing their tentpole pictures The Avengers (2012) and its sequel Age of Ultron (2015), and Warners saw him as a late-in-the-game saving grace. Known for his witty postmodernist dialogue and dynamic characterizations, Whedon brought a much lighter tone to the proceedings.

    And the results were still awful.

    The final product, released in 2017, not only was as jarring as the disparity between the work of Richard Donner and Richard Lester in the older Superman pictures (itself a legendary piece of film lore), Whedon’s reshoots looked downright terrible. Superman actor Henry Cavill was in the midst of filming a Mission: Impossible picture when asked to return for reshoots. Forbidden from shaving off a mustache by the other production, the special effects team instead digitally-erased the facial hair, with laughably bad results. The tonal differences between directors were obvious. Whedon decided to use the picture to work through his own ire regarding dismissal from the Marvel franchise, stubbornly transposing Avengers plot points into the revised script in a sort of meta-textual temper tantrum. And to top things off, word has recently broken that Black actor Ray Fisher felt antagonized on racial grounds by the new director, who is now facing his own reckoning for a multiplicity of chauvinist behaviors after carrying on for over two decades as an aspiring ambassador for high-minded, self-righteous Secular Humanism and liberal feminism.

    As a result, cultish film fans began a viral #ReleaseTheSnyderCut campaign, going as far as renting advertising and airplanes to force Warners’ hand. With the advent of COVID, the studio found its release calendar stalled for a year due to shuttering of movie theaters. Quicker than you can say “easy money,” the studio granted this wish to fans, delivering Snyder a pile of cash to finish the film as he originally envisioned.

    Reading a quickly-published nonfiction tie-in by reporter Sean O’Connell, Release the Snyder Cut: The Crazy True Story Behind the Fight That Saved Zack Snyder’s Justice League, it is blatantly obvious that the fans behind this campaign have, putting it politely, lost all grip of their critical faculties (the number of people who call the director “Zack,” as if they are on a first-name basis with him, is rather telling). Testimonials from participants absolutely gush with unbridled love for two ultra-reactionary motion pictures that, upon their release eight and five years ago respectively speaking, were reviled and rejected by the majority of genre fans. These are not the sorts of cinephiles that have a certain distance from the art they enjoy so to elaborate upon nuanced critiques that acknowledge textual shortcomings. Instead, these are religious fundamentalists singing hosannas to undeniably Objectivist films. When I read O’Connell’s multiple interview transcriptions claiming Man of Steel and Batman vs. Superman as quasi-divine revelations that provided emotional and psychological anchors for these people in an increasingly-frightening world, I take serious pause and ruminate for a long time about what kind of social alienation, marginalization, and intellectual/psychological vulnerabilities within the populace such claims evince. (It seems no coincidence that, in the nation-states serving as nodes for the grassroots social media blitz, this odd campaign was chronologically and geographically simultaneous with the ascendancy of right wing authoritarian elected officials such as Orban and Bolsonaro.)

    The pivotal question for me is whether Snyder has adjusted his personal politics in the lead-up to this production. While he still remains interested in remaking the original Ayn Rand screenplay of The Fountainhead that is owned by Warners, two major life events could have substantially adjusted his perspective. The first was the death of his daughter of suicide, a terrible manifestation of complex phenomena that might lead a parent to re-conceptualize their understanding of the welfare state and the social safety net that can play a role in reducing such mortality rates. Shakespeare proclaimed “all the world’s a stage” and the COVID-19 created a kind of yearlong tragic simulation of what a Randian elimination of the public health infrastructure looks like, with deadly results, the second potential ideological modifier. Interestingly, in the past few years, his creative output included an intricate tee shirt design, based upon the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life to explain the aborted Justice League sequel plots, that was sold as a fundraiser for a suicide prevention charity. Does this signal a turn towards a more organic Jewish spirituality and mysticism that was absent from his earlier pictures? And if so, is this the celebrity-friendly corporate Kabbalah favored by Hollywood capital? Or is it the Marxian-inclined mysticism of Walter Benjamin?

    Gal Gadot plays Wonder Woman, the famous Amazon from Themiscyra. An Israeli actress and therefore also a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces, she was a military trainer during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war and later expressed endorsement of the 2014 slaughter in Gaza, Operation Protective Edge. Although comic book sticklers will protest mightily and insist that the mythical Amazons of the hero’s origins are derived from Bronze Age Greeks, I cannot help but note the convergence of several strains of settler colonialism. Gadot hails from a nation-state whose continued existence is explicitly predicated upon the erasure of its Indigenous nationalities predating the Zionist project. By selecting a fictionalized, idealized European characterization rather than opting for a South American Indigene actor hailing from the Amazon basin, the film valorizes and reifies a form of American and Israeli whiteness that is quite common to Classical Hollywood Cinema. Her famed Lasso of Truth of course resembles a similar utility belt item relied upon by the American cowboy, the archetypical settler-colonist of the Western Frontier mythos. This is further buttressed by how the film affirms American policing, both implicitly (the Justice championed by this League is that of bourgeois property relations) and explicitly (Lois Lane, played by Amy Adams, hand-delivers a daily cup of coffee to her favorite cop on the beat with a smile).

    Ben Affleck’s turn as Batman was an intentional break from the Nolan trilogy, a portrayal of someone who has spent two decades defending Gotham City and wearied from the rugged experience, which has included his arch-nemesis Joker murdering Robin earlier off-screen. “I’m rich,” he responds when queried about his super-powers, certainly in line with the Objectivist subtext. The character has a certain sexuality that was written to engage multiple women simultaneously, including a flirtation with Wonder Woman. Bruce Wayne undeniably has always been a playboy millionaire, that was designed to be part of the disguise to mask his Caped Crusader alter ego. But this is also synoptic with Rand’s sexual ethos, predicated upon a world wherein romantic love and fidelity are not so much bourgeois cis-/hetero-normativities as signs of intellectual and moral weakness. Dr. Duggan writes:

    Rand’s fiction is rife with romantic triangles and quadrangles, with adultery and divorce, with homoerotic bonds among a heroine’s multiple lovers… The sex scenes feature conquest and eroticized physical struggle as powerful women submit to dominant men. But they do not then cling, depend, or nag—only the weak and the wives do that. And the romances emphatically do not end in marriage. These are fantasies for the New Woman that cut in multiple directions. Aspirational creative and professional freedom, circumscribed within a context of consensual, ecstatic sexual submission to heroic men, is available to the superior single woman producer. All the other women are either nagging parasites or starving primitives and incompetents… These are the qualities of superior individuals that, when constrained by an egalitarian revolutionary ethos, are twisted to antisocial and destructive ends…, qualities revealed via powerful physiques fit for imperial and class rule. The other categories of characters…demonstrate varieties of unfitness: the scheming ambitious party [and state] apparatchiks, the greedy and double-dealing speculators, and the brutal, envious mob.

    Ray Fisher’s turn as Cyborg, a nano-technological Frankenstein rescued from the brink of death by the intervention of his estranged father (played by Joe Morton), is the first moment in the text that suggests a shift away from Randian philosophy. The character has an omniscient connection to the worldwide web of computing technology, including the ability to effortlessly hack into financial, security, military, and other mainframes underwriting the state infrastructure. In the midst of learning his superpowers, he discovers an impoverished single mother who has been evicted from her apartment with an $11 bank balance. Instantaneously, he uses his hacking talents to inject tens of thousands of dollars into her personal account, a novel spin on Marx’s notion of fictitious capital. In the Objectivist universe, single mothers hard on their luck are little more than parasitic nuisances who should have known better and had an abortion instead (Rand’s reproductive praxis is blatantly eugenicist and Social Darwinist in the most brutally cruel expression possible). While undeniably maudlin Dickensian fluff, complete with a benevolent intervention from the well-meaning individual rather than a social policy seeking to ameliorate misery, it also bears mentioning that such gesture would have given Ayn Rand convulsions of rage. Fisher’s character trajectory furthermore seems to reflect upon two marginalized experiences, the differently-abled and African American struggles. His arc of development starts with visceral horror at his post-traumatic body and ends with acceptance/glorification of his abilities (though admittedly this does maintain an unveiled utilitarian scale of body valuation). His relationship with his parents, including some brief but important references to the daily degradations of interpersonal racism that everyone in the family unit experiences, while not as pronounced as The Black Panther film, is a major spine of the entire film’s plot and antithetical to Objectivist philosophy as well. (The disgusting revelation that Fisher has been blacklisted by the DC/Warners production unit for speaking out about on-set racism by Whedon during reshoots makes this film a tragic retroactive swan song for a character that, in a future picture under more competent direction, might have become a significant Black cinematic hero, perhaps surpassing Robert Downey, Jr.’s very similar Iron Man.)

    Jason Momoa’s Aquaman is a brooding loner, ambivalent about both his own heritage as a monarch of Atlantis and the notion of building a superhero team. While rather thin in comparison with other characters, this aversion of collective struggle is an Objectivist narrative trope surmounted. Rand’s alpha males have always reified the triumph of individualist will over a miasma of collectivism. He plays the consistent Devil’s Advocate, opposing many of the innovative and risky ideas that can (and actually quite often do) cause certain chaos.

    Ezra Miller’s turn as The Flash is the most shallow of the bunch because his character was always just a useful comedic foil. His challenging relationship with an incarcerated father is given little serious attention, his quips are lame, and it is obvious that he is really just being introduced for a follow-up solo picture. His function as the nerdy youngest member of the team is less of a character arc than a setup for a new film franchise that is currently in production.

    Snyder has been rather explicit about his subscription to the Hero’s Journey narrative developed by Joseph Campbell, demonstrated in the aforementioned Kabbalah-inspired artwork. In a minor row that erupted in the pages of The New York Review of Books starting in September 1989 when literary and architectural critic Brendan Gill denounced the recently-deceased anthropologist, then seeing a brief posthumous pop culture superstardom due to the success of a PBS miniseries with Bill Moyers, as a bigoted quack whose rather shallow, essentialist analysis of worldwide mythology “sanctions selfishness on a colossal scale—a scale that has become deplorably familiar to us in the Reagan and post-Reagan years. It is a selfishness that is the unspoken (the studiously unrecognized?) rationale of that contemporary army of Wall Street yuppies, of junk-bond dealers, of takeover lawyers who have come to be among the most conspicuous members of our society.” That NYRB episode elaborated on how Campbell’s narrative arc easily lends itself to Objectivist ethos, a rather telling insight about Man of Steel and Batman vs. Superman.

    In some alternative reality, had Snyder never exited the production in 2016-17, he still would not have been allowed to release this gargantuan gunk. Film studios and cinema booking agencies are very practical and a four hour block of time holding up a multiplex auditorium is heretical. It becomes even more controversial when the director in question has previously delivered two earlier entries in the same series that failed financial and critical expectations. This is not just an alternative version, it is Zack Snyder’s cinematic masturbation session. Absolutely every single excess, no matter how jaw-droppingly garish and mind-numbingly self-important, is blasted in the face of the viewer. (Had I not watched it on a small screen, I fear not so much having to exit the theater to pee but instead having a photo-sensitive epileptic episode.) The gore and violence is amplified to the extreme degree, most notably in an epic flashback battle scene set in the Bronze Age that blatantly plagiarizes the opening of the first Lord of the Rings picture, with the diabolical Darkseid shamelessly borrowing battle tactics from Sauron. Witless fans of this stuff do not seem cognizant of how this middle finger to the film’s producers is one that includes in the tell-off to any and all who might pause and ask aloud “Who in their right mind could possibly want any movie this long?” (I wonder if they realize the irony that the last time American cinema was graced with a similar four hour “director’s cut”, the film was titled Kenneth Brannagh’s Hamlet!)

    It does not advance a critical development in the genre or cinematic storytelling, instead the viewer is expected to gorge themselves on tropes, gimmicks, and archetypes that stopped being novel more than 75 years ago.

    This is the most regressive and pernicious development of this exercise. Fifty years ago, when Coppola, Scorsese, George Lucas, and their New Hollywood peers began producing their classic films, they fused Popular Front-era pulp texts with radical New Left critiques of the American social contract. The Godfather and Goodfellas were not classic gangster movies of the Cagney variety, instead they were subversive explosions of those inherited norms and archetypes. Raging Bull’s Jake LaMotta is such a masterful performance precisely because he was not a rehashed heroic sports star like The Gipper, he is a grotesque misogynist thug drunk on the toxic, paranoid masculinity inherent to the sport itself. The closest that the superhero genre has ever gotten to this sort of subversion was M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable (2000), produced a year before this current wave of films began, which concludes by showing that comic book fans are frighteningly sociopathic monsters capable of grotesque crimes so to serve their shallow conception of social engagement and human life itself, a rather sharp retroactive meta-commentary on the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut communicants. Even though this film is being hailed as somehow having a punk-ish elán, it in fact is a very loud endorsement of the most conformist tendencies in American society.

    And yet, despite all these qualms, I still personally desire to see Snyder return to the DC franchise and produce the films he planned out years ago. The film ends with a damnable not one but two teasers for the multi-part Justice League sequel that was intended to complete his five-film arc when he first commenced production over a decade ago.

    While he claims in multiple interviews that he is walking away from the series and DC/Warners, it seems that these sequel teases are intended to leave the door open for his reentry. Part of this must be sheer ego, he invested seven years of his life into building not just a multi-part narrative but an entire leviathan to rival one of the most successful franchises in world history, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Unlike the MCU, controlled by producer Kevin Feige, who fields individual productions out to directors he controls, Snyder was positioned to build the entire DC narrative ecosystem, functioning as a Walt Disney-like overlord for one of the most successful intellectual properties in America. It bears mentioning furthermore that Snyder played no small part in stoking the fires of the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut cult, teasing in the past four years about the film’s existence with tantalizing pictures of screen shots and film canisters that signaled to fans “It exists and you can urge the studio to make this happen!” Now that the cult has mass-converted to their #RestoreTheSnyderverse phase, one can only imagine his reaction.

    Yet part of this has to be a genuine desire to complete a project that might have given some substantial resolution to the problems like authoritarianism, structural oppression, and alienation that he teases out in the films. In this hypothetical Justice League trilogy, could Snyder have intended to defenestrate the Objectivist mythos that he introduced in his first two pictures? In Man of Steel, Jonathan Kent (Kevin Costner) repeatedly urges the young Last Son of Krypton not to reveal his powers to the public, even if that means letting a bus full of school children drown or allowing a parent to be swept away in a Kansas tornado (both scenes disgusted audiences to no end upon original release for reasons that encourage hope for the species). The adopted father’s logic is a pure distillation of Rand’s endorsement of selfishness above egalitarianism.

    But in these hypothetical sequels, might this Superman have chosen to reject Objectivism? Could Snyder have created this Objectivist fantasia in his first two films so to knock them apart in the latter three? Contra Jonathan Kent, Superman’s Kryptonian father Jor-El (Russell Crowe) consistently espouses a much more self-sacrificing praxis, directing his son to not so much engage in a Christ-like savior mission as inspire the masses to a more enlightened, egalitarian vision of/for society, fundamentally saving themselves. This maxim is almost Leninist but, disturbingly, does not adamantly guard against the Cult of Personality and other well-known Soviet abuses, something alluded to in the earlier films. Perhaps Snyder was trying to balance Rand’s critique of socialism against a concontaminant progressive critique of Objectivism?

    From what we know of these hypothetical sequels, the major arc was based around Superman turning to evil in fury over Lois Lane’s death precisely because his conception of relationship to her and the wider world was constituted through Jonathan Kent’s Objectivist lens. Winning him back from arch-villain Darkseid’s service would necessitate a full-scale rejection of Objectivism and embracing a more Kryptonian ethos, with the archetypical Objectivist alpha male Bruce Wayne/Batman journeying through his own arc leading to a self-sacrifice that likewise renounces Rand’s valorization of these class/gender roles. Was the Hero’s Journey supposed to be one away from Jonathan Kent towards Jor-El (read: the Jewish-American social democratic milieu of Depression-era comic book artists like Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster), reconstituting our understanding of mankind (and perhaps manhood?) on an ideological level that tacitly condemns what Alan Greenspan and Ayn Rand’s philosophy have done to humanity? We see such threads being teased out in this newest film when Ma Kent (Diane Lane) sees the mortgage to the family farm repossessed by the bank, clearly a nod to the 2008 housing bubble’s implosion. Such an ideological contradiction does not find its synthesis in proletarian revolution by default, instead Hollywood has consistently suggested liberal democracy.

    But it is a very different world from when Snyder first commenced production in October 2010. Populist upsurges in the United States, whether congregated around Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump or nationwide protests of all political orientations, have obviously shaken the ruling elite in a deep and profound way. This development is a longtime focus of Marxian film critics, the base-superstructure contradiction within the relationship of the audience to the film studios as a component of cultural reproduction/hegemony. While certainly problematic for a number of reasons, the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut project is a perfect simulation of this critical intervention and will serve as grist in the academic film studies mill for years to come. Where it will go next is an inquiry that cannot be simply written off as a mere weirdo fan cult (although it undeniably is that also). As they Tweet forth into the aether, Zack Snyder will continue to grapple with the discourse relative to the individual and society’s role in their protection, both as society mourns the COVID-19 pandemic and as the family mourns his daughter. This picture is soaked in parental relationships and, as many other critics have pointed out, it is impossible to not read a certain auteurist subtext about regret and grief regarding the tragic loss of a child. Could his completed Justice League trilogy further explore his own political evolution?

    The ball is in Warner/DC’s court and it is a strange position. Ray Fisher is out of their good graces, as are Whedon and Snyder. Yet they also have a massive fan-base hyped to Evangelical fervor on a holy crusade. It is rather sickening to off-load to a mega-corporate media enterprise any hope for justice, whether it be in the titular sense of this franchise or remediation of racialized grievances. Yet Ray Fisher, who delivered a satisfactory performance as a Black superhero that touches upon important topics in his national experience, deserves to have this film start something that might become important, particularly since the passing of Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman. And he has been adamant that, owing to the racist behavior of Warner/DC executives, he only will return to the franchise if Zack Snyder is involved. That condition feels important enough to reflect upon seriously. Should we desire such a return for Snyder?

    This feels like the cliff-hanging climax of a comic book!

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • It might strike some as odd to claim one of the most eagerly-anticipated films of 2021 was originally formulated as an Objectivist epic. Shock might be further compounded upon learning that this film exists thanks to a grassroots campaign not featuring the usual suspects from the Libertarian milieu (Ron Paul supporters, bow-tied dweebs of the Cato Institute/Tucker Carlson mold, operatives within the Koch network, Reason Magazine subscribers and AntiWar.com readers) but instead regular comic book fans, whose politics are normally more progressive-leaning owing to the social democratic inclinations of the genre’s heavyweight publishers, enterprises founded by interwar New York Jewish-American entrepreneurs steeped in (though not necessarily actively engaged in) the Old Left cultural milieu.

    And yet here we are, one year into an extremely weird annum that seems to oftentimes reflect Objectivism’s worst implications, and Zack Snyder’s Justice League has plopped into our midsts.

    The film’s plot is the same as the previous iteration released four years ago. After the death of Superman, Bruce Wayne races to build the Justice League, including Wonder Woman, the Flash, Cyborg, Aquaman, and eventually a resurrected Kryptonian. Their major antagonist is Steppenwolf, an extra-terrestrial with magnificent strength and abilities that is seeking to gain control of and then unite three Mother Boxes in service of a larger scheme that was intended to branch across two Justice League sequels that now may never be actually produced but (confoundingly) were foreshadowed in not one but two films. The major difference in the picture boils down to tone, length, and magnanimity.

    Prior to any serious engagement on a textual and critical level with the motion picture in question, it behooves me to open with an acknowledgement of the concrete realities underwriting the cinematic auteur at hand. Recall the following exchange from a Congressional hearing on October 23, 2008.

    REP. HENRY WAXMAN (D-California): The question I have for you is, you had an ideology, you had a belief that free, competitive — and this is your statement — “I do have an ideology. My judgment is that free, competitive markets are by far the unrivaled way to organize economies. We’ve tried regulation. None meaningfully worked.” That was your quote.

    You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others. And now our whole economy is paying its price. Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?

    FMR. FEDERAL RESERVE CHAIR ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, remember that what an ideology is, is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to — to exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not. And what I’m saying to you is, yes, I found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is, but I’ve been very distressed by that fact.

    WAXMAN: You found a flaw in the reality…

    GREENSPAN: Flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak.

    WAXMAN: In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working?

    GREENSPAN: That is — precisely. No, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I had been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.

    Alan Greenspan, originally appointed to the Fed Chair by Ronald Reagan and kept in that position by three successive administrations, became an acolyte of quack philosopher Ayn Rand in the early 1950s, a friendship that lasted until the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged died. He made Randian Objectivism hegemonic in the halls of American (and therefore worldwide unipolar) economic governance.

    Less than 20 years later, the world economy cataclysmically imploded because of the Fed’s refusal to regulate any part of the market, including the highly-volatile derivatives that pierced the housing bubble of the late ‘aughts. We can draw a direct tautological line from the Objectivist Fed to the increase of “deaths of despair” such as the opioids crisis, the ascendancy of the Tea Party and later Donald Trump, and any number of other horrors over the past thirteen years. If it were not so frighteningly true, the super-villain Alan Greenspan and his evil fortress at the Federal Reserve would have been laughed out of a comic book publisher’s office in 1975 for sounding so extremely hyperbolic it beggared belief from authors known for mundane characters like the gaia-gobbling Galactus and a Speedo-sporting walking pile of gravel known as Thing.

    All this bears mentioning because Justice League director Zack Snyder is an Objectivist. Over the past twenty years, he has adapted a series of comic titles, including Frank Miller’s 300, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, and now a trilogy featuring Superman, Batman, and the larger Justice League, that mask Randian fantasia under the auspices of “gritty realism.” While the recent three-picture adaptation of Atlas Shrugged (thankfully) failed miserably at the box office, Snyder’s DC Comics films apparently have done more than a quality adaptation of Rand’s dreary novels could ever hope to. The filmmaker has created a high-demand Objectivist action film franchise, a Promethean feat for the hard right of American politics.

    This is by no means a de facto outcome from adaptation of the DC Comics pantheon. Richard Donner and Christopher Reeve created a Superman that clearly exemplified the values of Jewish-American socialism in the 1970s, inflected through a New Left lens that included sharp emphasis upon feminist, environmental, and anti-militarist values. (The first film is a thorough indictment of land speculation and exploitative rentier economics while the final picture features the Man of Steel tossing the entire worldwide nuclear weapon supply into the sun!)

    Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher both portrayed Batman as a psychologically-complicated vigilante whose post-traumatic survivor’s guilt catalyzed an aspiration towards crimefighting. Both filmmakers, in their own ways, queered their storylines and characters, delivering tacit indictments of normative cis-/hetero-sexism that baffled and repulsed pubescent teens inculcated by Reagan-era puritanism.

    The long-running animated television franchises, beginning with Bruce Timm, Paul Dini, and Mitch Brian’s groundbreaking Batman: The Animated Series, grappled with heavy ethical, existential, and political questions about the liberal democratic social contract during Fukuyama’s supposed decade-long “end of history.”

    Since the latter half of the 1980s, DC Comics films and television shows leaned in a distinctly liberal-progressive direction, partially due to the influence of its longtime crosstown rival Marvel Comics, whose titles more openly discussed the Civil Rights movement and other elements of the Culture War, and partially as a result of ideological aftershocks of the Reagan-Bush era. The Warner Bros. animation franchises, some of which were heavily-financed by Democratic Party fundraising luminary Steven Spielberg, had a distinct aspiration to shift the cultural discourse “from the inside,” reflecting many of the multicultural dreams of Clinton-loving liberals and Gramscian social democrats who imagined the first post-Soviet American presidency as one that might exploit the peace dividend in a positive fashion.

    But then things changed because of two significant developments.

    First was the release of Christopher Nolan’s 2005 blockbuster Batman Begins, a film with a distinct strain of regressive neoliberalism. Nolan purged the protagonist of all those weirdo psychological tics and oddities, transforming him into a paragon of normativity. While Michael Keaton had an undeniable rubber and leather fetish, most pronounced in his haunting courtship of Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman (sporting a costume that would make Foucault envious), Christian Bale looked like he fit naturally onto a Forbes magazine cover. His romances were utterly heterosexual ones with partners embodying stereotypical white middle class Clinton-style feminism and his opponents were aberrations in the neoliberal social contract, one wherein Bruce Wayne and Wayne Enterprises were positioned as the valiant charitable benefactors of a state that was hopelessly corrupt, deficient, and obstructing progress. To borrow a phrase from Ralph Nader, this is a Gotham City where only the super-rich can save us.

    In 2006, the death knell came for these superheroic politics with Brian Singer’s pitiful Superman Returns. The director’s hyper-obsession with the Donner-Reeves franchise led him to Quixotically attempt a quasi-reboot/tribute/time traveling transplant of the older films. He failed follow the lead of Donner, who had breathed fresh air into the story with a character that was both a postmodern, self-referential spoof of the source material’s hammiest bits (Reeve’s portrayal always worked best when there was an implied wink-and-nod at the audience about how ridiculous the proceedings were, a Pynchon-esque picaresque deflating the underlying fascistic elements of the incarnate Übermensch narrative) and had an epic stature that reached for De Mille-like grandeur (Mario Puzo’s story, written when the author was riding high on The Godfather’s popularity, nears Homeric proportions when the Last Son of Krypton literally reverses the earth’s rotation to turn back time). Instead, audiences were given a strange homage that tried to impose a story that carried a distinct 1970s time-stamp into the 21st century, the cinematic equivalent of a classic rock performer onstage well past their prime who is blissfully unaware of their painful ontological self-parody. The results were calamitous.

    Superheroic social democratic politics were dead. Instead, the money had gone for a film starring an actor who, only a few years before in American Psycho, had (in an ironic turn the fans could call a retcon) shown how morally bankrupt such a reified and valorized political economy was. This was passed off as “gritty realism” by the Warner Bros. marketing department but in fact it is a deeply-defined endorsement of an ideology that has caused demonstrable harm to the globe over the past thirty-five years. While Nolan’s neoliberalism was a mainstream British Blairite New Labor flavor, Snyder’s was even more grotesque and reactionary.

    In her valuable 2019 polemic Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed, Dr. Lisa Duggan asks:

    How can the work of this one novelist (also an essayist, playwright, and philosopher), however influential, be a significant source of insight into the rise of a culture of greed? In a word: sex. Ayn Rand made acquisitive capitalists sexy. She launched thousands of teenage libidos into the world of reactionary politics on a wave of quivering excitement. This sexiness extends beyond romance to infuse the creative aspirations, inventiveness, and determination of her heroes with erotic energy, embedded in what Rand called her “sense of life.” Analogous to what Raymond Williams has called a “structure of feeling,” Rand’s sense of life combines the libido-infused desire for heroic individual achievement with contempt for social inferiors and indifference to their plight…

    Rand’s contrasting sense of life applies to those whose fantasies of success and domination include no doubt or guilt. The feelings of aspiration and glee that enliven Rand’s novels combine with contempt for and indifference to others. The resulting Randian sense of life might be called “optimistic cruelty.” Optimistic cruelty is the sense of life for the age of greed. Ayn Rand’s optimistic cruelty appeals broadly and deeply through its circulation of familiar narratives: the story of “civilizational” progress, the belief in American exceptionalism, and a commitment to capitalist freedom.

    Her novels engage fantasies of European imperial domination conceived as technological and cultural advancement, rather than as violent conquest. America is imagined as a clean slate for pure capitalist freedom, with no indigenous people, no slaves, no exploited immigrants or workers in sight… Their logic also depends on a hierarchy of value based on racialized beauty and physical capacity—perceived ugliness or disability are equated with pronounced worthlessness and incompetence.

    Through the forms of romance and melodrama, Rand novels extrapolate the story of racial capitalism as a story of righteous passion and noble virtue. They retell The Birth of a Nation through the lens of industrial capitalism. They solicit positive identification with winners, with dominant historical forces. It is not an accident that the novels’ fans, though gender mixed, are overwhelmingly white Americans of the professional, managerial, creative, and business classes.

    Perhaps I might buttress this with a point raised by graphic novelist Alan Moore, who said in an interview “Save for a smattering of non-white characters and non-white creators, these books and these iconic characters are still very much white supremacist dreams of the master race. In fact, I think that a good argument can be made for D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as the first American superhero movie, and the point of origin for all those capes and masks.” (Ironically, Moore’s famous Rorschach, the antihero of Watchmen, was intended as a pitch-black spoof of Randian Objectivism, a point that apparently escaped Snyder when he directed the film adaptation, perhaps suggesting the auteur is either an idiot or a sociopathic narcissist par excellence.)

    If we refract the film projector showcasing Zack Snyder’s trilogy of DC Comics adaptations through this lens, a truly troubling analysis emerges. Contra the norm of the Marvel films, which by and large have been rather bland action-comedies, Snyder opted for an ultra-serious quasi-Wagnerian soap opera about our heroes as archetypical deities walking among the living. (It is not accidental that he selected as the antagonists a set of creations authored by the legendary Jack Kirby literally named The New Gods, led by the universe-conquering Darkseid, who is intent on gaining control of something called “the Anti-Life Equation” that can grant the bearer control of everyone’s minds, including even Superman.) Rand was not shy about pointing out her affinity for Nietzsche and the fascistic tendencies her thoughts align with, though her apostolic apologists plead that her Russian Jewish heritage (somehow) inoculates her from such critiques. (The neoconservative book critic Whittaker Chambers once quipped “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber — go!’”)

    There is an ironic consequence to all this, however. The “gritty realism” is quite obviously an antithesis to the campy and sometimes openly-parodic nature of the earlier Superman and Batman pictures, epitomized when Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin (1997) seemed throughout its entire runtime to be doubling as a high-budget tacitly-gay romantic comedy informed by Warhol’s aesthetics.

    But by veering so far in the opposite direction, creating an utterly humorless universe, Snyder, whose style is so bombastic and self-important to write its own rebuttals upon viewing (witness the plethora of internet memes derived from his earlier films), inadvertently creates a film that cannot be called anything but ridiculous. The Justice League title and its predecessor, The Justice Society of America, were not authored by some visionary Homer-like poet at DC Comics. Instead, both were originally developed and published as the most narratively-shallow cash cows by editors and publishers responding to epistles from child readers who wrote “GO DO MAKE SUPERMAN FIGHT BATMAN BOOM!” What kind of standard can you possibly erect for such a project? How would one evaluate a cinematic adaptation of Moby Dick wherein Ishmael is played by Popeye and Ahab by Bluto?

    Subtlety is as foreign to Snyder’s misé en scene as humor and the results are so exhausting you cannot help laughing at the sheer lunacy of his pretensions. (Anyone familiar with the differences between Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather and the tawdry pulp source novel will understand that this is not exactly an unfamiliar dynamic for American cinema.) After the tenth Riefenstahl-referencing slow-motion action shot, complete with enough testosterone to power an entire professional wrestling Pay-Per-View special as part of its implicit Cult of the Body, the campiness is impossible to avoid.

    For mature viewers, this creates a sort of reflexively voyeuristic impulse, akin to watching a slow-motion car accident or reruns of the 2016 presidential debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, so obscene and grotesque one cannot turn away. But for the general public, easily conned by Rand’s grift and Snyder’s hyperbolic hyper-macho hypnosis, one cannot help to worry about what impact this might have in the body politic.

    The film itself is a strange case of the Director’s Cut, which says something for a sub-genre composed of some of the most counterintuitive moments in cinema history. Snyder originally signed on for a three-picture deal, delivering the lugubrious Man of Steel (2013) and then Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), whose titular resemblance to a civil tort perfectly reflects what a migraine the viewing was. While producing Justice League, Warners executives began to push back against the increasingly-nihilistic edge of the series, which had alienated fans and lowered subtotals on box office receipts. (I fondly remember a bilious, apoplectic negative review by my former colleague/former comic book store owner Steve Ahlquist of the latter picture.) When the director’s daughter tragically passed away, he and his wife, producer Deborah Snyder, gracefully stepped aside and surrendered post-production to Joss Whedon. The longtime wunderkind of American nerd culture had been a significant creative force in the rival Marvel Cinematic Universe, including directing their tentpole pictures The Avengers (2012) and its sequel Age of Ultron (2015), and Warners saw him as a late-in-the-game saving grace. Known for his witty postmodernist dialogue and dynamic characterizations, Whedon brought a much lighter tone to the proceedings.

    And the results were still awful.

    The final product, released in 2017, not only was as jarring as the disparity between the work of Richard Donner and Richard Lester in the older Superman pictures (itself a legendary piece of film lore), Whedon’s reshoots looked downright terrible. Superman actor Henry Cavill was in the midst of filming a Mission: Impossible picture when asked to return for reshoots. Forbidden from shaving off a mustache by the other production, the special effects team instead digitally-erased the facial hair, with laughably bad results. The tonal differences between directors were obvious. Whedon decided to use the picture to work through his own ire regarding dismissal from the Marvel franchise, stubbornly transposing Avengers plot points into the revised script in a sort of meta-textual temper tantrum. And to top things off, word has recently broken that Black actor Ray Fisher felt antagonized on racial grounds by the new director, who is now facing his own reckoning for a multiplicity of chauvinist behaviors after carrying on for over two decades as an aspiring ambassador for high-minded, self-righteous Secular Humanism and liberal feminism.

    As a result, cultish film fans began a viral #ReleaseTheSnyderCut campaign, going as far as renting advertising and airplanes to force Warners’ hand. With the advent of COVID, the studio found its release calendar stalled for a year due to shuttering of movie theaters. Quicker than you can say “easy money,” the studio granted this wish to fans, delivering Snyder a pile of cash to finish the film as he originally envisioned.

    Reading a quickly-published nonfiction tie-in by reporter Sean O’Connell, Release the Snyder Cut: The Crazy True Story Behind the Fight That Saved Zack Snyder’s Justice League, it is blatantly obvious that the fans behind this campaign have, putting it politely, lost all grip of their critical faculties (the number of people who call the director “Zack,” as if they are on a first-name basis with him, is rather telling). Testimonials from participants absolutely gush with unbridled love for two ultra-reactionary motion pictures that, upon their release eight and five years ago respectively speaking, were reviled and rejected by the majority of genre fans. These are not the sorts of cinephiles that have a certain distance from the art they enjoy so to elaborate upon nuanced critiques that acknowledge textual shortcomings. Instead, these are religious fundamentalists singing hosannas to undeniably Objectivist films. When I read O’Connell’s multiple interview transcriptions claiming Man of Steel and Batman vs. Superman as quasi-divine revelations that provided emotional and psychological anchors for these people in an increasingly-frightening world, I take serious pause and ruminate for a long time about what kind of social alienation, marginalization, and intellectual/psychological vulnerabilities within the populace such claims evince. (It seems no coincidence that, in the nation-states serving as nodes for the grassroots social media blitz, this odd campaign was chronologically and geographically simultaneous with the ascendancy of right wing authoritarian elected officials such as Orban and Bolsonaro.)

    The pivotal question for me is whether Snyder has adjusted his personal politics in the lead-up to this production. While he still remains interested in remaking the original Ayn Rand screenplay of The Fountainhead that is owned by Warners, two major life events could have substantially adjusted his perspective. The first was the death of his daughter of suicide, a terrible manifestation of complex phenomena that might lead a parent to re-conceptualize their understanding of the welfare state and the social safety net that can play a role in reducing such mortality rates. Shakespeare proclaimed “all the world’s a stage” and the COVID-19 created a kind of yearlong tragic simulation of what a Randian elimination of the public health infrastructure looks like, with deadly results, the second potential ideological modifier. Interestingly, in the past few years, his creative output included an intricate tee shirt design, based upon the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life to explain the aborted Justice League sequel plots, that was sold as a fundraiser for a suicide prevention charity. Does this signal a turn towards a more organic Jewish spirituality and mysticism that was absent from his earlier pictures? And if so, is this the celebrity-friendly corporate Kabbalah favored by Hollywood capital? Or is it the Marxian-inclined mysticism of Walter Benjamin?

    Gal Gadot plays Wonder Woman, the famous Amazon from Themiscyra. An Israeli actress and therefore also a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces, she was a military trainer during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war and later expressed endorsement of the 2014 slaughter in Gaza, Operation Protective Edge. Although comic book sticklers will protest mightily and insist that the mythical Amazons of the hero’s origins are derived from Bronze Age Greeks, I cannot help but note the convergence of several strains of settler colonialism. Gadot hails from a nation-state whose continued existence is explicitly predicated upon the erasure of its Indigenous nationalities predating the Zionist project. By selecting a fictionalized, idealized European characterization rather than opting for a South American Indigene actor hailing from the Amazon basin, the film valorizes and reifies a form of American and Israeli whiteness that is quite common to Classical Hollywood Cinema. Her famed Lasso of Truth of course resembles a similar utility belt item relied upon by the American cowboy, the archetypical settler-colonist of the Western Frontier mythos. This is further buttressed by how the film affirms American policing, both implicitly (the Justice championed by this League is that of bourgeois property relations) and explicitly (Lois Lane, played by Amy Adams, hand-delivers a daily cup of coffee to her favorite cop on the beat with a smile).

    Ben Affleck’s turn as Batman was an intentional break from the Nolan trilogy, a portrayal of someone who has spent two decades defending Gotham City and wearied from the rugged experience, which has included his arch-nemesis Joker murdering Robin earlier off-screen. “I’m rich,” he responds when queried about his super-powers, certainly in line with the Objectivist subtext. The character has a certain sexuality that was written to engage multiple women simultaneously, including a flirtation with Wonder Woman. Bruce Wayne undeniably has always been a playboy millionaire, that was designed to be part of the disguise to mask his Caped Crusader alter ego. But this is also synoptic with Rand’s sexual ethos, predicated upon a world wherein romantic love and fidelity are not so much bourgeois cis-/hetero-normativities as signs of intellectual and moral weakness. Dr. Duggan writes:

    Rand’s fiction is rife with romantic triangles and quadrangles, with adultery and divorce, with homoerotic bonds among a heroine’s multiple lovers… The sex scenes feature conquest and eroticized physical struggle as powerful women submit to dominant men. But they do not then cling, depend, or nag—only the weak and the wives do that. And the romances emphatically do not end in marriage. These are fantasies for the New Woman that cut in multiple directions. Aspirational creative and professional freedom, circumscribed within a context of consensual, ecstatic sexual submission to heroic men, is available to the superior single woman producer. All the other women are either nagging parasites or starving primitives and incompetents… These are the qualities of superior individuals that, when constrained by an egalitarian revolutionary ethos, are twisted to antisocial and destructive ends…, qualities revealed via powerful physiques fit for imperial and class rule. The other categories of characters…demonstrate varieties of unfitness: the scheming ambitious party [and state] apparatchiks, the greedy and double-dealing speculators, and the brutal, envious mob.

    Ray Fisher’s turn as Cyborg, a nano-technological Frankenstein rescued from the brink of death by the intervention of his estranged father (played by Joe Morton), is the first moment in the text that suggests a shift away from Randian philosophy. The character has an omniscient connection to the worldwide web of computing technology, including the ability to effortlessly hack into financial, security, military, and other mainframes underwriting the state infrastructure. In the midst of learning his superpowers, he discovers an impoverished single mother who has been evicted from her apartment with an $11 bank balance. Instantaneously, he uses his hacking talents to inject tens of thousands of dollars into her personal account, a novel spin on Marx’s notion of fictitious capital. In the Objectivist universe, single mothers hard on their luck are little more than parasitic nuisances who should have known better and had an abortion instead (Rand’s reproductive praxis is blatantly eugenicist and Social Darwinist in the most brutally cruel expression possible). While undeniably maudlin Dickensian fluff, complete with a benevolent intervention from the well-meaning individual rather than a social policy seeking to ameliorate misery, it also bears mentioning that such gesture would have given Ayn Rand convulsions of rage. Fisher’s character trajectory furthermore seems to reflect upon two marginalized experiences, the differently-abled and African American struggles. His arc of development starts with visceral horror at his post-traumatic body and ends with acceptance/glorification of his abilities (though admittedly this does maintain an unveiled utilitarian scale of body valuation). His relationship with his parents, including some brief but important references to the daily degradations of interpersonal racism that everyone in the family unit experiences, while not as pronounced as The Black Panther film, is a major spine of the entire film’s plot and antithetical to Objectivist philosophy as well. (The disgusting revelation that Fisher has been blacklisted by the DC/Warners production unit for speaking out about on-set racism by Whedon during reshoots makes this film a tragic retroactive swan song for a character that, in a future picture under more competent direction, might have become a significant Black cinematic hero, perhaps surpassing Robert Downey, Jr.’s very similar Iron Man.)

    Jason Momoa’s Aquaman is a brooding loner, ambivalent about both his own heritage as a monarch of Atlantis and the notion of building a superhero team. While rather thin in comparison with other characters, this aversion of collective struggle is an Objectivist narrative trope surmounted. Rand’s alpha males have always reified the triumph of individualist will over a miasma of collectivism. He plays the consistent Devil’s Advocate, opposing many of the innovative and risky ideas that can (and actually quite often do) cause certain chaos.

    Ezra Miller’s turn as The Flash is the most shallow of the bunch because his character was always just a useful comedic foil. His challenging relationship with an incarcerated father is given little serious attention, his quips are lame, and it is obvious that he is really just being introduced for a follow-up solo picture. His function as the nerdy youngest member of the team is less of a character arc than a setup for a new film franchise that is currently in production.

    Snyder has been rather explicit about his subscription to the Hero’s Journey narrative developed by Joseph Campbell, demonstrated in the aforementioned Kabbalah-inspired artwork. In a minor row that erupted in the pages of The New York Review of Books starting in September 1989 when literary and architectural critic Brendan Gill denounced the recently-deceased anthropologist, then seeing a brief posthumous pop culture superstardom due to the success of a PBS miniseries with Bill Moyers, as a bigoted quack whose rather shallow, essentialist analysis of worldwide mythology “sanctions selfishness on a colossal scale—a scale that has become deplorably familiar to us in the Reagan and post-Reagan years. It is a selfishness that is the unspoken (the studiously unrecognized?) rationale of that contemporary army of Wall Street yuppies, of junk-bond dealers, of takeover lawyers who have come to be among the most conspicuous members of our society.” That NYRB episode elaborated on how Campbell’s narrative arc easily lends itself to Objectivist ethos, a rather telling insight about Man of Steel and Batman vs. Superman.

    In some alternative reality, had Snyder never exited the production in 2016-17, he still would not have been allowed to release this gargantuan gunk. Film studios and cinema booking agencies are very practical and a four hour block of time holding up a multiplex auditorium is heretical. It becomes even more controversial when the director in question has previously delivered two earlier entries in the same series that failed financial and critical expectations. This is not just an alternative version, it is Zack Snyder’s cinematic masturbation session. Absolutely every single excess, no matter how jaw-droppingly garish and mind-numbingly self-important, is blasted in the face of the viewer. (Had I not watched it on a small screen, I fear not so much having to exit the theater to pee but instead having a photo-sensitive epileptic episode.) The gore and violence is amplified to the extreme degree, most notably in an epic flashback battle scene set in the Bronze Age that blatantly plagiarizes the opening of the first Lord of the Rings picture, with the diabolical Darkseid shamelessly borrowing battle tactics from Sauron. Witless fans of this stuff do not seem cognizant of how this middle finger to the film’s producers is one that includes in the tell-off to any and all who might pause and ask aloud “Who in their right mind could possibly want any movie this long?” (I wonder if they realize the irony that the last time American cinema was graced with a similar four hour “director’s cut”, the film was titled Kenneth Brannagh’s Hamlet!)

    It does not advance a critical development in the genre or cinematic storytelling, instead the viewer is expected to gorge themselves on tropes, gimmicks, and archetypes that stopped being novel more than 75 years ago.

    This is the most regressive and pernicious development of this exercise. Fifty years ago, when Coppola, Scorsese, George Lucas, and their New Hollywood peers began producing their classic films, they fused Popular Front-era pulp texts with radical New Left critiques of the American social contract. The Godfather and Goodfellas were not classic gangster movies of the Cagney variety, instead they were subversive explosions of those inherited norms and archetypes. Raging Bull’s Jake LaMotta is such a masterful performance precisely because he was not a rehashed heroic sports star like The Gipper, he is a grotesque misogynist thug drunk on the toxic, paranoid masculinity inherent to the sport itself. The closest that the superhero genre has ever gotten to this sort of subversion was M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable (2000), produced a year before this current wave of films began, which concludes by showing that comic book fans are frighteningly sociopathic monsters capable of grotesque crimes so to serve their shallow conception of social engagement and human life itself, a rather sharp retroactive meta-commentary on the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut communicants. Even though this film is being hailed as somehow having a punk-ish elán, it in fact is a very loud endorsement of the most conformist tendencies in American society.

    And yet, despite all these qualms, I still personally desire to see Snyder return to the DC franchise and produce the films he planned out years ago. The film ends with a damnable not one but two teasers for the multi-part Justice League sequel that was intended to complete his five-film arc when he first commenced production over a decade ago.

    While he claims in multiple interviews that he is walking away from the series and DC/Warners, it seems that these sequel teases are intended to leave the door open for his reentry. Part of this must be sheer ego, he invested seven years of his life into building not just a multi-part narrative but an entire leviathan to rival one of the most successful franchises in world history, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Unlike the MCU, controlled by producer Kevin Feige, who fields individual productions out to directors he controls, Snyder was positioned to build the entire DC narrative ecosystem, functioning as a Walt Disney-like overlord for one of the most successful intellectual properties in America. It bears mentioning furthermore that Snyder played no small part in stoking the fires of the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut cult, teasing in the past four years about the film’s existence with tantalizing pictures of screen shots and film canisters that signaled to fans “It exists and you can urge the studio to make this happen!” Now that the cult has mass-converted to their #RestoreTheSnyderverse phase, one can only imagine his reaction.

    Yet part of this has to be a genuine desire to complete a project that might have given some substantial resolution to the problems like authoritarianism, structural oppression, and alienation that he teases out in the films. In this hypothetical Justice League trilogy, could Snyder have intended to defenestrate the Objectivist mythos that he introduced in his first two pictures? In Man of Steel, Jonathan Kent (Kevin Costner) repeatedly urges the young Last Son of Krypton not to reveal his powers to the public, even if that means letting a bus full of school children drown or allowing a parent to be swept away in a Kansas tornado (both scenes disgusted audiences to no end upon original release for reasons that encourage hope for the species). The adopted father’s logic is a pure distillation of Rand’s endorsement of selfishness above egalitarianism.

    But in these hypothetical sequels, might this Superman have chosen to reject Objectivism? Could Snyder have created this Objectivist fantasia in his first two films so to knock them apart in the latter three? Contra Jonathan Kent, Superman’s Kryptonian father Jor-El (Russell Crowe) consistently espouses a much more self-sacrificing praxis, directing his son to not so much engage in a Christ-like savior mission as inspire the masses to a more enlightened, egalitarian vision of/for society, fundamentally saving themselves. This maxim is almost Leninist but, disturbingly, does not adamantly guard against the Cult of Personality and other well-known Soviet abuses, something alluded to in the earlier films. Perhaps Snyder was trying to balance Rand’s critique of socialism against a concontaminant progressive critique of Objectivism?

    From what we know of these hypothetical sequels, the major arc was based around Superman turning to evil in fury over Lois Lane’s death precisely because his conception of relationship to her and the wider world was constituted through Jonathan Kent’s Objectivist lens. Winning him back from arch-villain Darkseid’s service would necessitate a full-scale rejection of Objectivism and embracing a more Kryptonian ethos, with the archetypical Objectivist alpha male Bruce Wayne/Batman journeying through his own arc leading to a self-sacrifice that likewise renounces Rand’s valorization of these class/gender roles. Was the Hero’s Journey supposed to be one away from Jonathan Kent towards Jor-El (read: the Jewish-American social democratic milieu of Depression-era comic book artists like Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster), reconstituting our understanding of mankind (and perhaps manhood?) on an ideological level that tacitly condemns what Alan Greenspan and Ayn Rand’s philosophy have done to humanity? We see such threads being teased out in this newest film when Ma Kent (Diane Lane) sees the mortgage to the family farm repossessed by the bank, clearly a nod to the 2008 housing bubble’s implosion. Such an ideological contradiction does not find its synthesis in proletarian revolution by default, instead Hollywood has consistently suggested liberal democracy.

    But it is a very different world from when Snyder first commenced production in October 2010. Populist upsurges in the United States, whether congregated around Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump or nationwide protests of all political orientations, have obviously shaken the ruling elite in a deep and profound way. This development is a longtime focus of Marxian film critics, the base-superstructure contradiction within the relationship of the audience to the film studios as a component of cultural reproduction/hegemony. While certainly problematic for a number of reasons, the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut project is a perfect simulation of this critical intervention and will serve as grist in the academic film studies mill for years to come. Where it will go next is an inquiry that cannot be simply written off as a mere weirdo fan cult (although it undeniably is that also). As they Tweet forth into the aether, Zack Snyder will continue to grapple with the discourse relative to the individual and society’s role in their protection, both as society mourns the COVID-19 pandemic and as the family mourns his daughter. This picture is soaked in parental relationships and, as many other critics have pointed out, it is impossible to not read a certain auteurist subtext about regret and grief regarding the tragic loss of a child. Could his completed Justice League trilogy further explore his own political evolution?

    The ball is in Warner/DC’s court and it is a strange position. Ray Fisher is out of their good graces, as are Whedon and Snyder. Yet they also have a massive fan-base hyped to Evangelical fervor on a holy crusade. It is rather sickening to off-load to a mega-corporate media enterprise any hope for justice, whether it be in the titular sense of this franchise or remediation of racialized grievances. Yet Ray Fisher, who delivered a satisfactory performance as a Black superhero that touches upon important topics in his national experience, deserves to have this film start something that might become important, particularly since the passing of Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman. And he has been adamant that, owing to the racist behavior of Warner/DC executives, he only will return to the franchise if Zack Snyder is involved. That condition feels important enough to reflect upon seriously. Should we desire such a return for Snyder?

    This feels like the cliff-hanging climax of a comic book!

    The post Zach Snyder’s Justice League: A Four Hour Ayn Rand Fantasia appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Last Sunday, Marie Franco stood at the rear of a Rhode Island state prison building, cradling the portrait of her son Jose, who died needlessly while incarcerated due to contracting COVID-19. As we consider the well-manicured, PR-friendly profile of the subject at hand, keep in mind that Franco’s death was caused by this politician’s decisions, all of which were formulated through a lens that constantly queried “Will this help me get closer to a DC job?”

    President Joe Biden selected RI Gov. Gina Raimondo as Commerce Secretary on January 7, 2021 and she was approved by Congress, after some theatrical and positively-demented anti-Chinese red-baiting from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Cancun), on March 2. This came after being previously mentioned for several other Cabinet positions in the immediate aftermath of the November election.

    Thus closes a certain chapter of my journalism career. I’ve been reporting on Raimondo for several years [1] now and predicted almost four years ago exactly in a Counterpunch column [2] her career was far from over.

    Despite its reputation as a kind of mutant idiot cousin of Massachusetts, in fact Rhode Island has been a small neoliberal political alcove-cum-policy incubator for decades. Ira Magaziner, the Clinton confidante responsible for the Hillary-Care boondoggle of the early 1990s who later became the Clinton Foundation’s point man for HIV/AIDS, has an estate in the southern part of the state. The late Mark Weiner, a major Democratic fundraiser who cornered the market on presidential campaign merchandise and made a small fortune, lived in East Greenwich. Four years ago, Hillary Clinton’s VP pick Sen. Tim Kaine was in Newport when he was tapped for the spot on the ticket, perhaps at the posh (and racially-segregated) WASP beach resort Bailey’s that RI Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse belongs to. Last summer, a childhood friend living in the flight path of the state airport texted me and said that a large number of federal aircraft were landing that evening. On the one hand, it might have been troops being called in to potentially curtail the protests in Providence [3] responding to the George Floyd murder. On the other, it very well could have been the national Democratic sausage-making assembly line headed to the shoreline.

    I think the Rhode Island Democratic Party leadership just let out a massive sigh of collective relief. Raimondo was always an interloper.

    When she launched her political career by running for State Treasurer in 2010 (with secret dark money flowing from the coffers of Enron alum John Arnold and hedge funder Paul Tudor Jones), her PR campaign was predicated upon being a young, fresh-faced woman with solid experience in the private sector, a neoliberal feminist wunderkind of the Clinton breed that broke with old school Ocean State politics. Unlike machine Democrats, who pay their dues in municipal offices like School Committee or City Council members, she pole-vaulted over the line using a sparkling media image.

    She was a Rhodes scholar, a lawyer, a mom, and came out of the venture capitalist sector that had revived the Commonwealth next door with the so-called “Massachusetts Miracle.” What’s more, she was the kind of Italian that didn’t look, sound, and act like she could have been a bumbling goomba extra in a Coppola or Scorsese gangster film, a hallmark of almost every paisan in the Democratic Party! (Full disclosure: My grandfather was an Italian from Long Island, worth noting because most Americans conflate the smallest state with that suburban strait anyways.)

    What’s not to love?

    A lot!

    Her first major act in office boils down to a combination of late capitalist neoliberal strip-mining of the welfare state combined with shameless old-fashioned political blackmail. The Rhode Island legislature had run the state pension as a bail-out fund for their long-running, infamously corrupt, and utterly inept political schemes that would probably, under normal circumstances, have put a few former Treasurers and Governors (not to mention still-sitting legislators) in the dock for gross financial impropriety. The John and Laura Arnold Foundation (restructured as Arnold Ventures LLC in January 2019) hates public pension funds and conned the voters, in the aftermath of the 2007-09 crash, into believing there was a nationwide, systemic “pension crisis.” Paul Tudor Jones in turn loathes public education and is a big charter school funder. (Raimondo’s husband Andrew Moffit likewise is deeply enmeshed in the charter school project, working for the vile McKinsey & Co, the wretched hive of scum and villainy that blemished the record of Pete Buttigieg during the 2019-20 primary race and where Raimondo worked as a Summer Associate in 1995.)

    So Raimondo used a lot of highfalutin mathy-math talk to trick the voters into endorsing her investment of the pension into hedge funds that back charter schools. Now every week public school teachers see a payroll deduction that finances the busting of their own union, a Kafka-level contradiction.

    What’s worse, Raimondo’s claim that the investment would follow a dog-leg curve, with losses for the first few years followed by upwards tick and high returns, never happened, resulting in her “reform” being the largest loss of capital in state history! As a result of no uptick, pensioners have spent almost a decade without an annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) thanks to a legislative maneuver that barred any future COLAs until the pension reaches a forever-unreachable threshold caused by the advantageous “service fees” imposed on it regularly by the hedge fund managers. This equals dire economic consequences because, since the Rhode Island economy is heavily reliant upon retail and service industries, it reduces crucial levels of demand in the economy that retirees are reliably known for having as a result of their monthly pension checks. In essence, Raimondo has played a major role in keeping the economy depressed for over a decade so to bail out Wall Street. She also did herself one better by investing part of the pension in her own (actually not very) blind trust of assets that was created when she entered Treasury, showing that her instinctive Italian roots still know when and how to take a cut.

    Rather ironically, in 2014, third party candidate Robert J. Healey, a longtime Libertarian-inclined local political celebrity, scored 21.4% of the vote as a result of a political campaign including a gubernatorial debate where he expressed the most left-leaning rhetoric in challenging Raimondo over her education privatization agenda! [4] “I’d really like to know [if] Treasurer Raimondo’s husband, Andy Moffit, is engaged in the business of privatizing public education, and I just wonder what deal was probably talked about or cut with the NEA [National Education Association of Rhode Island] when they supported her position on education in her campaign… She tries to portray him as a schoolteacher, but he is involved in the movement to privatize the public schools… It’s more than pro-charter. He works for a company for the purposes of making money off [public schools],” he said.

    Part of the Democratic Party leadership’s annoyance with her stemmed from her being a motivated woman in an old-boys club, composed of the second- and third-generation alpha males that exited the ethnic mob enclaves for the greener pastures of political office after suburbanizing following World War II with the GI Bill.

    But part of it was because of how she broke with the old-fashioned corrupt patronage and nepotism networks that define Southern New England’s particularly weird (in a truly Lovecraftian sense) social democracy. Raimondo’s career microcosmically functions as one of the last battles between the old-line New Dealers of the postwar era and the Democratic Leadership Council brand of neoliberals hatched in the rubble of George McGovern’s Quixotic 1972 presidential campaign. This should be of particular note to Washington watchers who will be monitoring the efforts of social democrats like Bernie Sanders and the Squad during the Biden administration.

    It has become very apparent that Biden is not behaving the same way Obama did in his first months. Obama was a far more dogmatic neoliberal and utterly cynical, steamrolling everyone by smiling in the camera and saying “This grin will hypnotize you into allowing me to get away with murder, now watch as I bail out Wall Street for eight years and do nothing for Main Street.” It took three years until Occupy when we saw a significant mass-mobilization (leaving aside the blatantly-reactionary Tea Party) reach levels that we saw under Dubya. Biden by contrast knows who butters his bread and is acting accordingly. He is clearly aware that his domestic agenda has to grant some leeway or things could boil over quickly. While still instinctively-conservative, there also much seems to be an inclination towards some style of coalition building within this administration. This could be a point of pressure for both DSA and third party activists if they target people like Raimondo.

    From there onwards, Raimondo’s career has been nothing more than opportunism, austerity, privatization, and place-holding. Her quirky public-private partnership economic policy slogan was a perpetuation of “meds and eds,” expanding two nonprofit industries in Providence that subtract significant capital from city tax revenues annually by absorbing high-value properties. This aura of an expanding neoliberal humanitarianism therefore reduces funding for public schools, which in turn is a major engine feeding working class BIPOC students into the abominable school-to-prison pipeline.

    She always had her eyes on Washington and treated the Governor’s office as a stepping stone upwards, the working class and poor of Global Southern nationalities be damned because they would never vote for the troglodyte Republicans that steadily converted from neoconservative to outright white nationalist politics simultaneous with her political career. A union official wrongfully predicted for me in early 2017 that her goose was cooked because she has failed to deliver a swinging victory for Clinton in both the primary and general elections.

    I never doubted the opposite for a minute.

    Her scandals and foibles have been numerous but pale in comparison with the genesis of her career, the pension heist, and the other pillar, seeking to privatize every element of the welfare state that she could. She has worked with Education Commissioners over the past six years to crush the Providence Teachers Union, one of the largest white-collar elements of organized labor in the state, and her recent appointees, groomed by Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change, might actually make real headway, thanks in no small part to the disaster capitalism fostered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, she installed a president at the Community College of Rhode Island, a longtime educational entry point for first generation learners from lower income brackets, seeking to bust the professors union under the phony auspices of “free tuition.” The other two major pubic institutions of higher education, Rhode Island College and University of Rhode Island, have not escaped austerity, being slowly drowned by underfunding.

    I can imagine that this appointment means she will position Washington to favor the major interests that funded her career. The hedge fund industry will breathe a sigh of relief. Silicon Valley might see a collaboration between Commerce and Education to further de-professionalize and de-legitimize public school teachers via the Trojan horse of “individualized education” delivered via laptops. Hell, she might be crazy enough to try claiming the federal pension system is in “crisis” after the COVID depression and pester Janet Yellen to put that money into hedge funds as well!

    The other hub of labor politics to consider is the carceral state. Despite her pretensions to the contrary, COVID-19 policy towards the incarcerated has been Trumpian. For the past year, the Behind the Walls committee of Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), a group led by directly-impacted folx, has participated in a “Knock It Off Gina!” campaign as part of the Decarcerate Now coalition seeking implementation of humane policies that would alleviate dangerous circumstances. Here are demands being read outside the Adult Correctional Institution (ACI) on January 31:

    (Video credit: Steve Ahlquist of UpriseRI)

    Illustration Credit: Leonard Jefferson, Behind The Walls Committee

    – Halt arrests and grant personal recognizance so that our loved ones are not being held indefinitely at Intake waiting for court hearings and trials.

    – Reduce the prison population to control the spread of disease. Restore lost good time. Expedite parole hearings and release all eligible individuals. Utilize medical parole for all terminally ill, elderly, and immunocompromised individuals. Release all other eligible individuals into community confinement.

    – Recognize the entire ACI as a priority community for the COVID-19 vaccination, with an informed consent or opt-out process for the population.

    – Provide our loved ones with adequate Personal Protective Equipment (masks, soap, hand sanitizer) as recommended by the CDC.

    – Regularly administer universal testing across the population, including asymptomatic people.

    – Provide transparency and accountability to incarcerated people’s families. Publicly release a quarantine plan for staff and incarcerated people who test positive, as well as a formal process for family members to report noncompliance. Report daily COVID-19 numbers on the RIDOC website and social media.

    – End 23+ hour lockdown. It has proven ineffective as a quarantine measure, especially as incarcerated people continue to report that prisoners testing positive are being housed with those who have tested negative. Safely restore time outside cells, including access to yard time outdoors.

    A little over a week after that video was filmed, Jose Franco passed away from COVID-19 while incarcerated at the ACI. Here is his mother Marie speaking last weekend at a memorial service held during the weekly Decarcerate Now rally:

    (Video credit: Steve Ahlquist of UpriseRI)

    In the immediate aftermath of the Trump election, I attended a meeting where one woman described a rather instructive exchange with her neighbor. Querying about marking the ballot for the Donald, she asked:

    “Do you hate gays?”

    “No.”

    “Abortion?”

    “No.”

    “Immigrants?”

    “No.”

    “Blacks?”

    “No.”

    “Then why vote for him?”

    “Because Gina Raimondo took away my COLA!”

    If this should be an accurate forecast for the next for the next four years, I recall the words of Introduction to Allen Ginsburg’s Howl and Other Poems authored by William Carlos Williams: “Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.”

    NOTES

    1-https://washingtonbabylon.com/tag/gina-raimondo/

    2-https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/03/29/91530/

    3-https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/26/rhode-islands-gina-raimondo-a-case-study-in-democratic-perfidy-in-the-current-rebellion/

    4-https://www.providencejournal.com/article/20141029/news/310299987

    The post Biden’s Commerce Secretary is Pure Clintonism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Image by Brian McGowan.

    This article was originally submitted for consideration by a forthcoming encyclopedia. Owing to format and length concerns, the editors requested a substantial revision but acceded to this draft’s publication in another venue. As a short survey as opposed to a substantive history, it is impossible to deny that there are gaps, including the absence of personages that might scandalize some readers. I can only respond with my deepest apologies for such offenses and suggest a consultation with The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, a far more substantial and thorough accounting. A word of deep thanks and appreciation to Paul Buhle, a pen-pal whose wisdom, memories, and openness models how the word comrade might truly be defined.

    Science fiction, known by its shorthand abbreviation sci-fi, has a deep link with the socialist project dating back to the days of the Second International. Alongside the typical literary osmosis that occurs when authors absorb radical politics of their contemporaries, there is a distinct history of the genre’s texts serving as an imaginative laboratory for socialist/communist prepositions and/or propositions. The epistemological horizon of utopia invites these experiments in the imagination, sometimes resulting in practical consequences. For instance, Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887, one of the foundational time travel texts in the genre, catalyzed the creation of an entire political movement of clubs seeking to nationalize the means of production, hence their nomenclature as Nationalist Clubs. This trend has amplified in the last 140 years (though Bellamy might have been horrified to see how many forecasts have instead served a different side of class struggle).

    A persistent trend that amplified in this half-century period was the multi-media nature of the genre. Prior to 1970, there were niches within literature, film, television, and other visual art forms that fostered cottage industries. By contrast, in 2020, it was possible to look at multiple platforms and media types to see each contained sci-fi genres that not only were well-established but quantified as the largest financial successes in that given media form ever, case and point the Marvel Comics Cinematic Universe and the Star Wars franchises ranking as the two highest-grossing film series in worldwide box office history. Video games, popular music, comic books, collectible statuary, fashion, children’s toys, and many more forms of art now have distinct and prominent sci-fi artistic expressions. An entire cable television channel, SyFy, launched in September 1992 as the Sci-Fi Channel, remains a programming staple nationwide and has generated its own award-winning media. While a historical survey of the first half of the century describes a niche audience, this period describes a major centrifuge of capital accumulation within an increasingly-consolidated and deregulated multimedia market system.

    Furthermore, a distinct internationalism within the genre is impossible to avoid. Due to both capital’s globalization and human solidarities extending beyond nation-state borders, it is possible to honestly discuss American audiences that gave high estimation and reverie to worldwide authors. Simultaneously, expatriate Americans, like Norman Spinrad, made their home on foreign shores while building substantive bodies of work. These multinational authors found an orbit around the hub of unipolar American capitalism, distinctly different from how national literary genres held a provincial existence during the Cold War. While in 1920, Soviet science fiction would remain undiscovered by Anglophone audiences for several decades in some instances, by 2020 the distinctively dialectical novels of Chinese author Cixin Liu were bestsellers that President Barack Obama was endorsing within less than ten years of first publication and translation. This was emblematic of a booming Sinophonic import market with large readership that included both mainland nationals and expats. The academic study of science fiction became a popular disciplinary project that included substantial analysis of these nuances.

    This period also saw the arrival of a new century and millennium that had long been forecast within the genre. As the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber quipped,

    There is a secret shame hovering over all us in the twenty-first century. No one seems to want to acknowledge it. For those in what should be the high point of their lives, in their forties and fifties, it is particularly acute, but in a broader sense it affects everyone. The feeling is rooted in a profound sense of disappointment about the nature of the world we live in, a sense of a broken promise—of a solemn promise we felt we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like… I am referring, of course, to the conspicuous absence, in 2015, of flying cars.

    While consumer-grade personal levitation vehicles have yet to appear on the market, a wide range of technologies originally foreseen in these fictions did become commercial enterprises. The internet, large-scale video-based communications, the digitization of millions of texts into libraries accessible across the globe (both for free and on basis of purchase/subscription), web-based social networking systems, artificially synthesized food with high nutritional value, educational courses delivered via computers, encyclopedias authored by millions of collaborators, and mobile communication devices that can reach the other side of the planet while fitting comfortably in your pocket all were prefigured by the genre before becoming a reality, much as theoretical atomic bombs populated texts decades before 1945. Generations of scientists in both the private sector and at public agencies like NASA were inspired by science fiction to create technologies we have become reliant upon in this new century.

    And, just as many of the genre’s more progressive and radical authors predicted, capital has embraced these technologies not in order to better the collective standards of living for humanity but instead to generate new and unique forms of value extraction. Many of the more dystopian predictions from within the genre, such as an elite capitalist class ensconced in comfort while the vast majority of the population suffers in the face of economic precarity and ecological calamity, have become a reality.

    In 2009, cultural critic Mark Fisher described an important emerging genre nuance:

    Watching [Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film] Children of Men, we are inevitably reminded of the phrase attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. That slogan captures precisely what I mean by ‘capitalist realism’: the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it. Once, dystopian films and novels were exercises in such acts of imagination – the disasters they depicted acting as narrative pretext for the emergence of different ways of living. Not so in Children of Men. The world that it projects seems more like an extrapolation or exacerbation of ours than an alternative to it. In its world, as in ours, ultra-authoritarianism and Capital are by no means incompatible: internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist. In Children of Men, public space is abandoned, given over to uncollected garbage and stalking animals (one especially resonant scene takes place inside a derelict school, through which a deer runs). Neoliberals, the capitalist realists par excellence, have celebrated the destruction of public space but, contrary to their official hopes, there is no withering away of the state in Children of Men, only a stripping back of the state to its core military and police functions (I say ‘official’ hopes since neoliberalism surreptitiously relied on the state even while it has ideologically excoriated it. This was made spectacularly clear during the banking crisis of 2008, when, at the invitation of neoliberal ideologues, the state rushed in to shore up the banking system.)

    Whether the antithetical rebellion envisioned by these authors as a response to this political economy will be victorious in Eugène Pottier’s “final conflict” wherein “The Internationale/Will be the human race” remains still in the forecast column as of this writing. Conversely, in consideration of the high mainstream media market share of texts fitting this genre designation, one can also trace a distinct and noteworthy trend whereby these fictions now reify and reinforce dominant capitalist ideological systems in a fashion that is distinctly different from Fisher’s diagnostic matrix. While Fisher was referencing a lack of imaginative horizon emerging in texts that otherwise contemplated forms of rebellion against the dominant order, it is necessary to further examine science fiction texts enforcing superstructural systems of capitalist hegemony.

    Conversely, it is impossible to neglect the distinct impact of science fiction upon contemporary politics. There now exist several generations of radical adults and youths who have grown to political awakening in a culture saturated in science fiction multimedia. As just one instance, the Introductory essay to Marxian economist Michael Hudson’s 2015 Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy included a not-too-subtle reference to the Wachowski Sisters’ The Matrix. The internet meme as a form of political art oftentimes combines a still image from a sci-fi text with a witty quip about contemporary politics. The 2019 Verso Books title Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani had a distinctly science fictional horizon. Activists and organizers have these texts as referents that are just as inspirational as the writings of Marx, Lenin, and Mao were for earlier generations. The slogan “We Are the 99%” of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the aesthetics of the worldwide digital “hactivist” Anonymous Collective carried a dimension indebted to dystopian texts of the prior two decades, with the eponymous Guy Fawkes mask, borrowed directly from the 2005 cinematic adaptation of Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta graphic novel, popping up at rallies held by both movements. During the presidency of Donald Trump, “Wakanda Forever,” transposed from the 2018 superhero film Black Panther, became a slogan of pride and resistance that seems to be a synthesis of the Black Power era’s militancy with a distinctly utopian vision. While earlier authors brought scientific socialist references into their texts, we now seem to have reached a point of synthesis, a deeply-embedded science fiction socialist aesthetic.

    The science fiction genre has developed across a multitude of media forms since the 1970s and the advent of the so-called “New Wave” (itself a dubious appellation). The conjunction with radical politics in this half-century period is likewise complex and multi-faceted, due in no small part to the collapse of traditional partisan-style organizing. As was the case with radical scholars in the academy that embraced ideological examination and a turn towards cultural studies, radical currents within texts have manifested in a multiplicity of formations that defy simple categorization. What follows is an attempt to profile currents which emerged in a contemporaneous fashion, with some overlap, that describe developments in the genre.

    A-THE NEW WAVE PERIOD

    For these purposes, the designation “New Wave” will reference a generation of writers born shortly before, during, or after the Second World War that came to prominence after 1960 and shared several contrarian stylistic traits. While the appellation has a more formal consistency as pertaining to British writers, the term is much more plastic in America, not unlike a similar function for the phrase “New Left.” Writers in America who are commonly grouped under this heading would beg to differ with the categorization in several instances. Furthermore, some were old enough to have written for the traditional pulp magazines decades earlier and did so. As such, this phrasing will instead reference a group of authors that were known for dissatisfaction with preexisting genre conventions and norms that dated back to the so-called “Golden Age” of interwar pulp romances. Literary critic Shannon Davies Mancus writes “New Wave writers, though they varied in age, were part of a cohort on an ontological precipice. A key part of this shared consciousness shift was the perception that enlightenment era thinking and ‘rational’ politics had failed.” The porous membrane is further complicated by the distinctly American nuances that inflected the genre. For instance, while Robert A. Heinlein was a conservative libertarian-inclined Republican with overt racist themes in his writings, his 1961 Stranger in a Strange Land had an undeniable impact on this cohort. This can be explained by the ideological convergence shared by radicals and reactionaries in the high estimation of Jeffersonian liberal democratic philosophy.

    Authors like Harlan Ellison, Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia E. Butler, Kurt Vonnegut, Phillip K. Dick, and many others embraced and expressed themes common to the New Left critique of the American social contract, such as antiracism, anti-imperialism, opposition to gender/sex/sexuality norms and discrimination, drug experimentation, ecological degradation, the Frankfurt School’s critique of consumerism, and antiauthoritarianism. (Ellison, for example, dedicated a 1971 anthology titled Alone Against Tomorrow to the students at Kent State shot by National Guard troops the year before.) Their writings not only engaged with tabooed story topics, such as blatant non-hetero-sexuality, but also challenged forms and norms of narrative structure in ways that went far beyond the traditional limitations to first-/third-person narratives typical of mainstream American Romantic literature.

    During the Vietnam War, the writer’s community was evenly split. In a June 1968 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine, on a two page advertisement there appeared oppositional statements, one featuring writers signing an endorsement of the war and the other a denouncement and call for withdrawal from combat. David M. Higgins interestingly notes “Cold War SF often, therefore, thrives on the pleasures of imperial masochism, or the enjoyment that comes from imaginatively occupying the position of a subaltern victim,” a tendency that includes individuals who either did or would have signed both sides of the 1968 Galaxy advertisement. “This is one of the strangest legacies that the Vietnam War has created for American SF: American audiences, who are the privileged beneficiaries of imperial globalization, are constantly invited to identify with anticolonial guerilla [sic] freedom fighters (like the Viet Cong), despite the almost total absence of any attempt whatsoever to understand actual Vietnamese perspectives concerning one of the most brutal and devastating wars in either Vietnamese or American history.”

    In many ways, Ellison played an outsized role in this generation’s prominence. His two acclaimed anthologies, Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972), much like pulp magazines for several earlier generations, established in public consciousness membership in this contentious designation and what could be expected. Perhaps the most popular overtly political novel was Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, wherein the author sought to outline the functional methods of an anarcho-communist society.

    Following the cult success of Blade Runner, a futuristic neo-noir directed by Ridley Scott, Phillip K. Dick’s work experienced a posthumous rediscovery unlike any other. Dick was published by the pulps starting in 1952 and had a continuous output of work until his death in 1982. For several decades, his name alone constituted a small sub-genre of existentialist sci-fi pictures that are deeply suspicious of the status quo (and sometimes reality itself). A Scanner Darkly, later adapted into a powerful and technologically-groundbreaking film by Richard Linklater, offered an eerily prescient critique of America’s public health and carceral methods of addressing substance use disorder. After the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, the Amazon Studios television adaptation of his alternate history The Man in the High Castle, about a fascist United States ruled by a victorious Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, attained a new resonance unforeseen when premiered the year before.

    While not necessarily categorized in this New Wave group, horror author Stephen King, who named one of his sons after martyred Wobbly organizer Joe Hill, penned several novels that clearly overlap with science fiction while exploring similar ideological territory. The Long Walk and The Running Man deal with hyper-consumerist futuristic societies, Hearts in Atlantis contemplates the fate of the New Left generation, 11/22/63 is a time travel story centered on President Kennedy’s assassination as a pivotal event that determined the fate of the world, The Stand is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape, and the nine volume Dark Tower cycle fuses elements of fantasy, inter-dimensional/time travel, and Spaghetti Western narrative tropes. His repudiation of Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic adaptation of The Shining was underwritten by a New Left feminist critique.

    A slightly younger author with a more hard sci-fi inclination, Kim Stanley Robinson, member of the Democratic Socialists of America, used his works to explore ecology, colonization of the solar system in response to population growth, and economic/social justice themes. His Ph. D thesis in English was advised by Fredric Jameson and dealt with the writings of Philip K. Dick.

    B-THE SPACE OPERA BLOCKBUSTER

    With the exception of television shows like Dr. Who, Star Trek (which broke new ground by featuring the first ever televised interracial kiss between William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols), The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone (both of which embraced the anti-nuclear arms proliferation movement of the Cold War era), as well as few and far-between films like Planet of the Apes (including as writers several survivors of the Hollywood Blacklist) and 2001: A Space Odyssey, science fiction cinema was designated a genre for children and low-budget B movie production companies, with a subsidiary cottage industry of imported Japanese kaiju monster movies such as the Godzilla series.

    This was changed permanently in 1977 following the surprise success of George Lucas’ Star Wars, which remade both what was possible within the confines of the genre and the Hollywood film release calendar. Along with the earlier success of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, the summer was changed from a season of low-grade fare to the time when studios would release films with high production values catered to youths and teens. The Lucas picture over the next four decades inspired the release of high-cost space operas, including 13 cinematic adaptations of Roddenberry’s Trek that increasingly borrowed stylistic and narrative tropes from Lucas, much to the chagrin of older fans. (The 1996 First Contact film in fact admitted the political economy of the Trek universe was a Marxian pure communist one, complete with the abolition of the money commodity.) While it limited for many years the storytelling boundaries to the soft sci-fi realm, it also led to critical examination of major New Left ideas and causes. The Alien series, combining horror with blue collar shipping industry ethos in outer space, offered a thorough (and at times frightening) feminist politics personified by the tough-as-nails Ellen Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver) and a subtle critique of the neoliberal prioritization of profit over human welfare. Issues like racism and genocide, homo/bi-sexuality, HIV/AIDS, and other topics would migrate from protest movement literature into the multiple rebooted Trek television shows, J. Michael Straczynski’s Byzantine Babylon 5, and other franchises. Lucas’ much-maligned prequel trilogy of Star Wars films held as a central conflict a dispute over (intergalactic) free trade and deregulation, the first screenplay having been begun just a year after President Bill Clinton’s passage of the onerous North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) that accelerated the deindustrialization of the United States’ manufacturing core.

    As an auxiliary of this development, these franchises have each generated novels that now compose significant shares of the book sellers market. Under the banner of Star Wars/Trek, novelists have subtly injected critiques of late capitalism that have flown under the radar and become bestsellers. While certainly unable to reach for the levels of innovation akin Samuel R. Delaney’s Dhalgren (very few of the Star Wars novels have ever featured anything except third person omniscient narration), authors have been afforded a space to popularize progressive and radical politics that might not otherwise find such a large audience.

    C-CYBERPUNK AND THE END OF HISTORY

    Cyberpunk developed following the publication of William Gibson’s 1984 Neuromancer. It combined a nihilistic critique of neoliberalism, a skeptical moral ambiguity of psychological medication, and the novelty of the world wide web into a potent mix clearly indebted to Old Left detective noir genre conventions. Frederic Jameson described it as “the supreme literary expression if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself.” Over the following three decades, cyberpunk (and spin-offs like steampunk, dieselpunk, and biopunk) were extremely popular. The Terminator (1984) was seen as a substantial examination of gender roles and misogyny at the time of its release. The Matrix (1999-2003), arguably the most successful cyberpunk film series (featuring a cameo by Democratic Socialists of America éminence grise Dr. Cornel West), combined a number of mystical notions indebted to Eastern religious traditions with a cinematic seminar on ideology, including references to Marx, Gramsci, Foucault, the Frankfurt School, and Baudrillard. Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentleman graphic novel series published by New York-based DC Comics, seen as a foundational steampunk text, used a postmodern pastiche of Victorian Romantic literary heroes repurposed as a superhero team to express Moore’s anarchist critique of early 21st century society. The Mad Max series, a progenitor of the dieselpunk genre, included an anti-nuclear and feminist critique of patriarchy. In a January 2019 article for Slate magazine, however, Lee Konstantinou wrote “I have come to suspect these punk derivatives signal something more than the usual merry-go-round of pop culture… These new subgenres often repeat the same gestures as cyberpunk, discover the same facts about the world, and tell the same story… The 1980s have, in a sense, never ended; they seem as if they might never end.” Perhaps this is reflective of the hegemony of neoliberalism and therefore an unintentionally-powerful critique of contemporary political economy. In contrast with the previous half century, this 50 year period has featured only two economic paradigms governing America, the close of the postwar Pentagon Keynesian epoch and the ascendancy of neoliberalism. This relative uniformity might explain the limitations of horizons within certain sectors of science fiction and the repetition of the –punk metier, a variation on Francis Fukuyama’s claims about “the end of history.”

    D-SCIENCE FICTION THEMES IN POSTMODERN, MAGICAL REALIST, AND OTHER LITERATURE

    While Jameson designated cyberpunk as “the supreme literary expression” of postmodernism, it is simultaneously impossible to claim that all cyberpunk and its various progeny can be classified as postmodernist. As it became a mainstream sub-genre, the -punk projects absconded adherence to the literary qualifiers for postmodernism in the name of commercial appeal. However, sci-fi themes began to migrate into other modes of literature. Postmodern author Thomas Pynchon’s novels all included sci-fi elements, noted in 1973 when his Gravity’s Rainbow was nominated for the Nebula Award. His 2006 Against the Day was a meta-commentary on sci-fi’s history and its aforementioned intersection with radical politics in America, featuring pre-World War I anarchists that collaborate with hydrogen airship piloting teams in globe-spanning adventures in formulating an implicitly-contemporary critique of “anti-terrorism” a century later. Kurt Vonnegut, who began his career in the pulps with less-sophisticated novels and short stories, graduated into the literary canon with novels such as Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, both of which were staples of high school and college curricula by the close of the century. Tony Kushner’s “Gay Fantasia on National Themes” Angels in America, an epic two-part drama about the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, included angels, psychic journeys, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, and a Brechtian script rebutting the neoconservative onslaught. Canadian Margaret Atwood found an unexpected renaissance in the later 2010’s around her feminist dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale, about a patriarchal theocracy that relegates women to a feudal procreative utility and little more that was originally written in 1985 as a meditation on the Evangelical Christian element of the Reagan coalition. It was later adapted as a television series that was released shortly after the inauguration of Trump and the historic 2017 Women’s March. Throughout Trump’s four year term, feminist activists would sport T-shirts and costumes referencing the drama while opposing assaults on reproductive rights and other feminist causes.

    Magical realism, which includes fantastic themes and conventions expressed in more subtle, less Romantic methods, emerged as part of the Latin American literary tradition before being absorbed worldwide. Writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a close friend of Fidel Castro, and Isabel Allende, niece of slain Chilean president Salvador Allende, were extremely popular in English translation. Toni Morrison, whose first career as an editor at Random House included shepherding the publication of autobiographies by Angela Y. Davis and Muhammad Ali, authored a number of Magical Realist classics that grappled with African American life and politics, including her ghost story Beloved and the fantastical The Song of Solomon. Other similar instances of this sort of osmosis can be seen in the poetry of Anne Boyer, an adamant Marxist who contemplated the “dismal science” in conjunction with her own health struggles.

    The growth of the Young Adult subgenre, thanks in no small part to the success of the Harry Potter fantasy series and its imitators, has included a large staple of science fiction novels, such as the dystopian Hunger Games. An auxiliary of this has been the explosion in popularity of graphic novels, made up of compendiums reprinting earlier standard comic books as well as original narratives.

    E-AFROFUTURISM

    Perhaps the most intriguing development in the genre over the past few decades has been Afrofuturism. Addressed explicitly to the representational disparities and flawed characterizations of African Americans in these texts, the project seeks to envision a future of Blackness that is celebratory and joyous in the face of contemporaneous struggle and hardship. Pointing to the fictional writings of W.E.B. Du Bois (especially his short story “The Comet”), Octavia Butler, Ralph Ellison, and Samuel R. Delany, the music albums of Sun Ra and Parliament Funkadelic, films like Brother from Another Planet, and Marvel’s Black Panther comic book serial, it emerged into mainstream media prominence with the #BlackLivesMatter/Movement for Black Lives developments of the 2010s. In this sense, it has an organic radicalism that is grounded in a critique of political economy. It also directly confronts arguably the most successful scientifically fictional discourse in American history, race and racism, and how it pervaded both the genre and wider society as a factual notion, including ways that sci-fi novels and stories both overtly and inadvertently reify racialist ideology within the framework of extraterrestrial inter-species contact. (This topic was also addressed in the 1972 alternate history novel The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad, which imagined if Adolph Hitler had become a pulp author expatriated to America rather than a politician in Weimar Germany.) One of the most prominent new writers, N.K. Jemisin, engaged readily with the legacy of the New Wave generation as well as the social gains of the Left over the past century, perhaps most hopefully in her provocatively-titled How Long ‘til Black Future Month? (2018)

    This development was simultaneous with a series of events in the fan community that demonstrated a simmering political divide within. From 2014-17, reactionary members of the World Science Fiction Convention formed a voting bloc within the polity that awards the annual Hugos, one of the major industrial accolades of the genre, as a result of alleged “biases” that “favored” multicultural authors and texts. The Sad Puppies and various progeny sought to promote right wing militarist fictions, some with explicit misogyny, racism, and homo-/trans-phobia. This bloc seemed to in hindsight be a microcosmic augury of the aggrieved Euro-American working class and petit bourgeois voters that flocked to Donald Trump’s explicit nativism during the 2015-16 presidential election. As these two currents came into contradiction with one another, it suggested a set of novel developments that would break with stale conventions, such as a pedestrian and sclerotic mainstreaming of postmodernist irony in high-grossing but otherwise superficial films like Disney/Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy.

    CONCLUSION

    With the coming of the new century’s second decade, multiculturalism and feminist ethics infused the genre alongside a distinctly new forecast, the impending impacts of cataclysmic global warming. A significant theme within not only dystopias but any texts dealing with the future includes contemplation of what climate change will mean for the species. Major motion pictures, such as the 2012 Cloud Atlas (dirs. The Wachowski Sisters and Tom Tykwer), 2017’s Bade Runner 2049 (dir. Denis Villeneuve), 2020’s Tenet (dir. Christopher Nolan), and multiple other texts envision a future where coastal flooding, food depletion due to crop loss, and social consequences of these developments play across the screen. Remaining pulp magazines, such as Asimov’s and Analog, regularly feature authors that include these themes in their imaginings. As the event that may become the prime concern of the homo sapien over the next half-century, ecological themes will continue to grow in prominence. It is possible to foresee a polarization that was articulated originally in the writings of Vermont’s eco-anarchist Murray Bookchin. On the Left there will appear a plea for egalitarian principles and radical emancipatory redistribution as basic resources, such as habitable land, potable water, and food supplies, decrease exponentially. The Right will take on features Bookchin detailed succinctly in a polemic about reactionary “deep ecology:”

    It was out of this kind of crude eco-brutalism that Hitler, in the name of ‘population control,’ with a racial orientation, fashioned theories of blood and soil that led to the transport of millions of people to murder camps like Auschwitz. The same eco-brutalism now reappears…among self-professed deep ecologists who believe that Third World peoples should be permitted to starve to death and that desperate Indian immigrants from Latin America should be exclude by the border cops from the United States lest they burden ‘our’ ecological resources… Deep ecology is so much of a black hole of half-digested, ill-formed, and half-baked ideas that one can easily express utterly vicious notions…and still sound like a fiery radical who challenges everything that is anti-ecological in the present realm of ideas. The very words deep ecology, in fact, clue is into the fact that we are not dealing with a body of clear ideas but with a bottomless pit in which vague notions and moods of all kinds can be such into the depths of an ideological toxic dump.

    Will textual authors evenly subdivide as they did around the Vietnam War half a century ago? Will progressive formations, bearing some resemblance to Popular Front assemblies of authors in the Depression and Second World War, devise a unified framework to profess opposition to this resurgent ethno-nationalism?

    The other challenge that the genre will confront is the digital paradigm and its re-formulation of text distribution networks. While the internet was originally formulated in science fiction, the systems of publication and distribution, as has been the case for all text genres, have encountered an adaptation challenge, with a large fraction of the industry still arrested in the analog traditions. Intellectual property and notions of textual ownership only form one half of the challenge. The other is a massive saturation of markets that render older distribution forms, such as periodicals and books, not so much obsolete as proportionally less valuable. What does it mean for a professionalized industry when it is flooded overnight with websites that feature free content, including fan-authored fictions about franchise characters that were previously exclusive to authorized writers and artists? How does one utilize the internet to generate profits for publication when the forces of monopolization, consolidation, and privatization of essential communications networks are concentrated so significantly in such powerful tech firms? The web-based magazine Clarkesworld, founded by editor Neil Clarke in October 2006, has explored a subscription paradigm heavily-dependent upon the e-book format with print issues as an auxiliary function that could point in one direction. Simultaneously, multiple periodicals have embraced the free podcasting system as a method of distribution, allowing readers to experience stories in an audio format that was previously a much more cost-prohibitive one.

    Perhaps there is a synthesis to be gleaned from the radical movements of the people in the new century. As a response to the American Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTEL-PRO) operated by police agencies, radicals in the new century have developed an innovative network of decentralized, horizontal systems of base-building and mobilization that provide strategic versatility. While these systems do carry their own challenges, such novelty might occasion a further fusion of the genre and politics in a way reminiscent of Edward Bellamy.

    WORKS CITED

    Bookchin, Murray. “Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology: A Challenge for the Ecology Movement.” Green Perspectives: Newsletter of the Green Program Project, 1987. Anarchy Archives, dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/socecovdeepeco.html.

    Butler, Andrew M. “Riding the New Wave.” The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, edited by Gerry Canavan and Eric Carl Link, Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 323–337.

    Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books, 2010.

    Graeber, David. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Melville House Publishing, 2016.

    Higgins, David M. “New Wave Science Fiction and the Vietnam War.” The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, edited by Gerry Canavan and Eric Carl Link, Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 415–433.

    Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991.

    Konstantinou, Lee. “Something Is Broken in Our Science Fiction: Why Can’t We Move Past Cyberpunk?” Slate Magazine, 15 Jan. 2019, slate.com/technology/2019/01/hopepunk-cyberpunk-solarpunk-science-fiction-broken.html.

    The post Science Fiction Since 1970 appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Image by Brian McGowan.

    This article was originally submitted for consideration by a forthcoming encyclopedia. Owing to format and length concerns, the editors requested a substantial revision but acceded to this draft’s publication in another venue. As a short survey as opposed to a substantive history, it is impossible to deny that there are gaps, including the absence of personages that might scandalize some readers. I can only respond with my deepest apologies for such offenses and suggest a consultation with The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, a far more substantial and thorough accounting. A word of deep thanks and appreciation to Paul Buhle, a pen-pal whose wisdom, memories, and openness models how the word comrade might truly be defined.

    Science fiction, known by its shorthand abbreviation sci-fi, has a deep link with the socialist project dating back to the days of the Second International. Alongside the typical literary osmosis that occurs when authors absorb radical politics of their contemporaries, there is a distinct history of the genre’s texts serving as an imaginative laboratory for socialist/communist prepositions and/or propositions. The epistemological horizon of utopia invites these experiments in the imagination, sometimes resulting in practical consequences. For instance, Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887, one of the foundational time travel texts in the genre, catalyzed the creation of an entire political movement of clubs seeking to nationalize the means of production, hence their nomenclature as Nationalist Clubs. This trend has amplified in the last 140 years (though Bellamy might have been horrified to see how many forecasts have instead served a different side of class struggle).

    A persistent trend that amplified in this half-century period was the multi-media nature of the genre. Prior to 1970, there were niches within literature, film, television, and other visual art forms that fostered cottage industries. By contrast, in 2020, it was possible to look at multiple platforms and media types to see each contained sci-fi genres that not only were well-established but quantified as the largest financial successes in that given media form ever, case and point the Marvel Comics Cinematic Universe and the Star Wars franchises ranking as the two highest-grossing film series in worldwide box office history. Video games, popular music, comic books, collectible statuary, fashion, children’s toys, and many more forms of art now have distinct and prominent sci-fi artistic expressions. An entire cable television channel, SyFy, launched in September 1992 as the Sci-Fi Channel, remains a programming staple nationwide and has generated its own award-winning media. While a historical survey of the first half of the century describes a niche audience, this period describes a major centrifuge of capital accumulation within an increasingly-consolidated and deregulated multimedia market system.

    Furthermore, a distinct internationalism within the genre is impossible to avoid. Due to both capital’s globalization and human solidarities extending beyond nation-state borders, it is possible to honestly discuss American audiences that gave high estimation and reverie to worldwide authors. Simultaneously, expatriate Americans, like Norman Spinrad, made their home on foreign shores while building substantive bodies of work. These multinational authors found an orbit around the hub of unipolar American capitalism, distinctly different from how national literary genres held a provincial existence during the Cold War. While in 1920, Soviet science fiction would remain undiscovered by Anglophone audiences for several decades in some instances, by 2020 the distinctively dialectical novels of Chinese author Cixin Liu were bestsellers that President Barack Obama was endorsing within less than ten years of first publication and translation. This was emblematic of a booming Sinophonic import market with large readership that included both mainland nationals and expats. The academic study of science fiction became a popular disciplinary project that included substantial analysis of these nuances.

    This period also saw the arrival of a new century and millennium that had long been forecast within the genre. As the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber quipped,

    There is a secret shame hovering over all us in the twenty-first century. No one seems to want to acknowledge it. For those in what should be the high point of their lives, in their forties and fifties, it is particularly acute, but in a broader sense it affects everyone. The feeling is rooted in a profound sense of disappointment about the nature of the world we live in, a sense of a broken promise—of a solemn promise we felt we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like… I am referring, of course, to the conspicuous absence, in 2015, of flying cars.

    While consumer-grade personal levitation vehicles have yet to appear on the market, a wide range of technologies originally foreseen in these fictions did become commercial enterprises. The internet, large-scale video-based communications, the digitization of millions of texts into libraries accessible across the globe (both for free and on basis of purchase/subscription), web-based social networking systems, artificially synthesized food with high nutritional value, educational courses delivered via computers, encyclopedias authored by millions of collaborators, and mobile communication devices that can reach the other side of the planet while fitting comfortably in your pocket all were prefigured by the genre before becoming a reality, much as theoretical atomic bombs populated texts decades before 1945. Generations of scientists in both the private sector and at public agencies like NASA were inspired by science fiction to create technologies we have become reliant upon in this new century.

    And, just as many of the genre’s more progressive and radical authors predicted, capital has embraced these technologies not in order to better the collective standards of living for humanity but instead to generate new and unique forms of value extraction. Many of the more dystopian predictions from within the genre, such as an elite capitalist class ensconced in comfort while the vast majority of the population suffers in the face of economic precarity and ecological calamity, have become a reality.

    In 2009, cultural critic Mark Fisher described an important emerging genre nuance:

    Watching [Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film] Children of Men, we are inevitably reminded of the phrase attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. That slogan captures precisely what I mean by ‘capitalist realism’: the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it. Once, dystopian films and novels were exercises in such acts of imagination – the disasters they depicted acting as narrative pretext for the emergence of different ways of living. Not so in Children of Men. The world that it projects seems more like an extrapolation or exacerbation of ours than an alternative to it. In its world, as in ours, ultra-authoritarianism and Capital are by no means incompatible: internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist. In Children of Men, public space is abandoned, given over to uncollected garbage and stalking animals (one especially resonant scene takes place inside a derelict school, through which a deer runs). Neoliberals, the capitalist realists par excellence, have celebrated the destruction of public space but, contrary to their official hopes, there is no withering away of the state in Children of Men, only a stripping back of the state to its core military and police functions (I say ‘official’ hopes since neoliberalism surreptitiously relied on the state even while it has ideologically excoriated it. This was made spectacularly clear during the banking crisis of 2008, when, at the invitation of neoliberal ideologues, the state rushed in to shore up the banking system.)

    Whether the antithetical rebellion envisioned by these authors as a response to this political economy will be victorious in Eugène Pottier’s “final conflict” wherein “The Internationale/Will be the human race” remains still in the forecast column as of this writing. Conversely, in consideration of the high mainstream media market share of texts fitting this genre designation, one can also trace a distinct and noteworthy trend whereby these fictions now reify and reinforce dominant capitalist ideological systems in a fashion that is distinctly different from Fisher’s diagnostic matrix. While Fisher was referencing a lack of imaginative horizon emerging in texts that otherwise contemplated forms of rebellion against the dominant order, it is necessary to further examine science fiction texts enforcing superstructural systems of capitalist hegemony.

    Conversely, it is impossible to neglect the distinct impact of science fiction upon contemporary politics. There now exist several generations of radical adults and youths who have grown to political awakening in a culture saturated in science fiction multimedia. As just one instance, the Introductory essay to Marxian economist Michael Hudson’s 2015 Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy included a not-too-subtle reference to the Wachowski Sisters’ The Matrix. The internet meme as a form of political art oftentimes combines a still image from a sci-fi text with a witty quip about contemporary politics. The 2019 Verso Books title Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani had a distinctly science fictional horizon. Activists and organizers have these texts as referents that are just as inspirational as the writings of Marx, Lenin, and Mao were for earlier generations. The slogan “We Are the 99%” of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the aesthetics of the worldwide digital “hactivist” Anonymous Collective carried a dimension indebted to dystopian texts of the prior two decades, with the eponymous Guy Fawkes mask, borrowed directly from the 2005 cinematic adaptation of Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta graphic novel, popping up at rallies held by both movements. During the presidency of Donald Trump, “Wakanda Forever,” transposed from the 2018 superhero film Black Panther, became a slogan of pride and resistance that seems to be a synthesis of the Black Power era’s militancy with a distinctly utopian vision. While earlier authors brought scientific socialist references into their texts, we now seem to have reached a point of synthesis, a deeply-embedded science fiction socialist aesthetic.

    The science fiction genre has developed across a multitude of media forms since the 1970s and the advent of the so-called “New Wave” (itself a dubious appellation). The conjunction with radical politics in this half-century period is likewise complex and multi-faceted, due in no small part to the collapse of traditional partisan-style organizing. As was the case with radical scholars in the academy that embraced ideological examination and a turn towards cultural studies, radical currents within texts have manifested in a multiplicity of formations that defy simple categorization. What follows is an attempt to profile currents which emerged in a contemporaneous fashion, with some overlap, that describe developments in the genre.

    A-THE NEW WAVE PERIOD

    For these purposes, the designation “New Wave” will reference a generation of writers born shortly before, during, or after the Second World War that came to prominence after 1960 and shared several contrarian stylistic traits. While the appellation has a more formal consistency as pertaining to British writers, the term is much more plastic in America, not unlike a similar function for the phrase “New Left.” Writers in America who are commonly grouped under this heading would beg to differ with the categorization in several instances. Furthermore, some were old enough to have written for the traditional pulp magazines decades earlier and did so. As such, this phrasing will instead reference a group of authors that were known for dissatisfaction with preexisting genre conventions and norms that dated back to the so-called “Golden Age” of interwar pulp romances. Literary critic Shannon Davies Mancus writes “New Wave writers, though they varied in age, were part of a cohort on an ontological precipice. A key part of this shared consciousness shift was the perception that enlightenment era thinking and ‘rational’ politics had failed.” The porous membrane is further complicated by the distinctly American nuances that inflected the genre. For instance, while Robert A. Heinlein was a conservative libertarian-inclined Republican with overt racist themes in his writings, his 1961 Stranger in a Strange Land had an undeniable impact on this cohort. This can be explained by the ideological convergence shared by radicals and reactionaries in the high estimation of Jeffersonian liberal democratic philosophy.

    Authors like Harlan Ellison, Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia E. Butler, Kurt Vonnegut, Phillip K. Dick, and many others embraced and expressed themes common to the New Left critique of the American social contract, such as antiracism, anti-imperialism, opposition to gender/sex/sexuality norms and discrimination, drug experimentation, ecological degradation, the Frankfurt School’s critique of consumerism, and antiauthoritarianism. (Ellison, for example, dedicated a 1971 anthology titled Alone Against Tomorrow to the students at Kent State shot by National Guard troops the year before.) Their writings not only engaged with tabooed story topics, such as blatant non-hetero-sexuality, but also challenged forms and norms of narrative structure in ways that went far beyond the traditional limitations to first-/third-person narratives typical of mainstream American Romantic literature.

    During the Vietnam War, the writer’s community was evenly split. In a June 1968 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine, on a two page advertisement there appeared oppositional statements, one featuring writers signing an endorsement of the war and the other a denouncement and call for withdrawal from combat. David M. Higgins interestingly notes “Cold War SF often, therefore, thrives on the pleasures of imperial masochism, or the enjoyment that comes from imaginatively occupying the position of a subaltern victim,” a tendency that includes individuals who either did or would have signed both sides of the 1968 Galaxy advertisement. “This is one of the strangest legacies that the Vietnam War has created for American SF: American audiences, who are the privileged beneficiaries of imperial globalization, are constantly invited to identify with anticolonial guerilla [sic] freedom fighters (like the Viet Cong), despite the almost total absence of any attempt whatsoever to understand actual Vietnamese perspectives concerning one of the most brutal and devastating wars in either Vietnamese or American history.”

    In many ways, Ellison played an outsized role in this generation’s prominence. His two acclaimed anthologies, Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972), much like pulp magazines for several earlier generations, established in public consciousness membership in this contentious designation and what could be expected. Perhaps the most popular overtly political novel was Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, wherein the author sought to outline the functional methods of an anarcho-communist society.

    Following the cult success of Blade Runner, a futuristic neo-noir directed by Ridley Scott, Phillip K. Dick’s work experienced a posthumous rediscovery unlike any other. Dick was published by the pulps starting in 1952 and had a continuous output of work until his death in 1982. For several decades, his name alone constituted a small sub-genre of existentialist sci-fi pictures that are deeply suspicious of the status quo (and sometimes reality itself). A Scanner Darkly, later adapted into a powerful and technologically-groundbreaking film by Richard Linklater, offered an eerily prescient critique of America’s public health and carceral methods of addressing substance use disorder. After the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, the Amazon Studios television adaptation of his alternate history The Man in the High Castle, about a fascist United States ruled by a victorious Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, attained a new resonance unforeseen when premiered the year before.

    While not necessarily categorized in this New Wave group, horror author Stephen King, who named one of his sons after martyred Wobbly organizer Joe Hill, penned several novels that clearly overlap with science fiction while exploring similar ideological territory. The Long Walk and The Running Man deal with hyper-consumerist futuristic societies, Hearts in Atlantis contemplates the fate of the New Left generation, 11/22/63 is a time travel story centered on President Kennedy’s assassination as a pivotal event that determined the fate of the world, The Stand is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape, and the nine volume Dark Tower cycle fuses elements of fantasy, inter-dimensional/time travel, and Spaghetti Western narrative tropes. His repudiation of Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic adaptation of The Shining was underwritten by a New Left feminist critique.

    A slightly younger author with a more hard sci-fi inclination, Kim Stanley Robinson, member of the Democratic Socialists of America, used his works to explore ecology, colonization of the solar system in response to population growth, and economic/social justice themes. His Ph. D thesis in English was advised by Fredric Jameson and dealt with the writings of Philip K. Dick.

    B-THE SPACE OPERA BLOCKBUSTER

    With the exception of television shows like Dr. Who, Star Trek (which broke new ground by featuring the first ever televised interracial kiss between William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols), The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone (both of which embraced the anti-nuclear arms proliferation movement of the Cold War era), as well as few and far-between films like Planet of the Apes (including as writers several survivors of the Hollywood Blacklist) and 2001: A Space Odyssey, science fiction cinema was designated a genre for children and low-budget B movie production companies, with a subsidiary cottage industry of imported Japanese kaiju monster movies such as the Godzilla series.

    This was changed permanently in 1977 following the surprise success of George Lucas’ Star Wars, which remade both what was possible within the confines of the genre and the Hollywood film release calendar. Along with the earlier success of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, the summer was changed from a season of low-grade fare to the time when studios would release films with high production values catered to youths and teens. The Lucas picture over the next four decades inspired the release of high-cost space operas, including 13 cinematic adaptations of Roddenberry’s Trek that increasingly borrowed stylistic and narrative tropes from Lucas, much to the chagrin of older fans. (The 1996 First Contact film in fact admitted the political economy of the Trek universe was a Marxian pure communist one, complete with the abolition of the money commodity.) While it limited for many years the storytelling boundaries to the soft sci-fi realm, it also led to critical examination of major New Left ideas and causes. The Alien series, combining horror with blue collar shipping industry ethos in outer space, offered a thorough (and at times frightening) feminist politics personified by the tough-as-nails Ellen Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver) and a subtle critique of the neoliberal prioritization of profit over human welfare. Issues like racism and genocide, homo/bi-sexuality, HIV/AIDS, and other topics would migrate from protest movement literature into the multiple rebooted Trek television shows, J. Michael Straczynski’s Byzantine Babylon 5, and other franchises. Lucas’ much-maligned prequel trilogy of Star Wars films held as a central conflict a dispute over (intergalactic) free trade and deregulation, the first screenplay having been begun just a year after President Bill Clinton’s passage of the onerous North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) that accelerated the deindustrialization of the United States’ manufacturing core.

    As an auxiliary of this development, these franchises have each generated novels that now compose significant shares of the book sellers market. Under the banner of Star Wars/Trek, novelists have subtly injected critiques of late capitalism that have flown under the radar and become bestsellers. While certainly unable to reach for the levels of innovation akin Samuel R. Delaney’s Dhalgren (very few of the Star Wars novels have ever featured anything except third person omniscient narration), authors have been afforded a space to popularize progressive and radical politics that might not otherwise find such a large audience.

    C-CYBERPUNK AND THE END OF HISTORY

    Cyberpunk developed following the publication of William Gibson’s 1984 Neuromancer. It combined a nihilistic critique of neoliberalism, a skeptical moral ambiguity of psychological medication, and the novelty of the world wide web into a potent mix clearly indebted to Old Left detective noir genre conventions. Frederic Jameson described it as “the supreme literary expression if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself.” Over the following three decades, cyberpunk (and spin-offs like steampunk, dieselpunk, and biopunk) were extremely popular. The Terminator (1984) was seen as a substantial examination of gender roles and misogyny at the time of its release. The Matrix (1999-2003), arguably the most successful cyberpunk film series (featuring a cameo by Democratic Socialists of America éminence grise Dr. Cornel West), combined a number of mystical notions indebted to Eastern religious traditions with a cinematic seminar on ideology, including references to Marx, Gramsci, Foucault, the Frankfurt School, and Baudrillard. Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentleman graphic novel series published by New York-based DC Comics, seen as a foundational steampunk text, used a postmodern pastiche of Victorian Romantic literary heroes repurposed as a superhero team to express Moore’s anarchist critique of early 21st century society. The Mad Max series, a progenitor of the dieselpunk genre, included an anti-nuclear and feminist critique of patriarchy. In a January 2019 article for Slate magazine, however, Lee Konstantinou wrote “I have come to suspect these punk derivatives signal something more than the usual merry-go-round of pop culture… These new subgenres often repeat the same gestures as cyberpunk, discover the same facts about the world, and tell the same story… The 1980s have, in a sense, never ended; they seem as if they might never end.” Perhaps this is reflective of the hegemony of neoliberalism and therefore an unintentionally-powerful critique of contemporary political economy. In contrast with the previous half century, this 50 year period has featured only two economic paradigms governing America, the close of the postwar Pentagon Keynesian epoch and the ascendancy of neoliberalism. This relative uniformity might explain the limitations of horizons within certain sectors of science fiction and the repetition of the –punk metier, a variation on Francis Fukuyama’s claims about “the end of history.”

    D-SCIENCE FICTION THEMES IN POSTMODERN, MAGICAL REALIST, AND OTHER LITERATURE

    While Jameson designated cyberpunk as “the supreme literary expression” of postmodernism, it is simultaneously impossible to claim that all cyberpunk and its various progeny can be classified as postmodernist. As it became a mainstream sub-genre, the -punk projects absconded adherence to the literary qualifiers for postmodernism in the name of commercial appeal. However, sci-fi themes began to migrate into other modes of literature. Postmodern author Thomas Pynchon’s novels all included sci-fi elements, noted in 1973 when his Gravity’s Rainbow was nominated for the Nebula Award. His 2006 Against the Day was a meta-commentary on sci-fi’s history and its aforementioned intersection with radical politics in America, featuring pre-World War I anarchists that collaborate with hydrogen airship piloting teams in globe-spanning adventures in formulating an implicitly-contemporary critique of “anti-terrorism” a century later. Kurt Vonnegut, who began his career in the pulps with less-sophisticated novels and short stories, graduated into the literary canon with novels such as Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, both of which were staples of high school and college curricula by the close of the century. Tony Kushner’s “Gay Fantasia on National Themes” Angels in America, an epic two-part drama about the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, included angels, psychic journeys, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, and a Brechtian script rebutting the neoconservative onslaught. Canadian Margaret Atwood found an unexpected renaissance in the later 2010’s around her feminist dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale, about a patriarchal theocracy that relegates women to a feudal procreative utility and little more that was originally written in 1985 as a meditation on the Evangelical Christian element of the Reagan coalition. It was later adapted as a television series that was released shortly after the inauguration of Trump and the historic 2017 Women’s March. Throughout Trump’s four year term, feminist activists would sport T-shirts and costumes referencing the drama while opposing assaults on reproductive rights and other feminist causes.

    Magical realism, which includes fantastic themes and conventions expressed in more subtle, less Romantic methods, emerged as part of the Latin American literary tradition before being absorbed worldwide. Writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a close friend of Fidel Castro, and Isabel Allende, niece of slain Chilean president Salvador Allende, were extremely popular in English translation. Toni Morrison, whose first career as an editor at Random House included shepherding the publication of autobiographies by Angela Y. Davis and Muhammad Ali, authored a number of Magical Realist classics that grappled with African American life and politics, including her ghost story Beloved and the fantastical The Song of Solomon. Other similar instances of this sort of osmosis can be seen in the poetry of Anne Boyer, an adamant Marxist who contemplated the “dismal science” in conjunction with her own health struggles.

    The growth of the Young Adult subgenre, thanks in no small part to the success of the Harry Potter fantasy series and its imitators, has included a large staple of science fiction novels, such as the dystopian Hunger Games. An auxiliary of this has been the explosion in popularity of graphic novels, made up of compendiums reprinting earlier standard comic books as well as original narratives.

    E-AFROFUTURISM

    Perhaps the most intriguing development in the genre over the past few decades has been Afrofuturism. Addressed explicitly to the representational disparities and flawed characterizations of African Americans in these texts, the project seeks to envision a future of Blackness that is celebratory and joyous in the face of contemporaneous struggle and hardship. Pointing to the fictional writings of W.E.B. Du Bois (especially his short story “The Comet”), Octavia Butler, Ralph Ellison, and Samuel R. Delany, the music albums of Sun Ra and Parliament Funkadelic, films like Brother from Another Planet, and Marvel’s Black Panther comic book serial, it emerged into mainstream media prominence with the #BlackLivesMatter/Movement for Black Lives developments of the 2010s. In this sense, it has an organic radicalism that is grounded in a critique of political economy. It also directly confronts arguably the most successful scientifically fictional discourse in American history, race and racism, and how it pervaded both the genre and wider society as a factual notion, including ways that sci-fi novels and stories both overtly and inadvertently reify racialist ideology within the framework of extraterrestrial inter-species contact. (This topic was also addressed in the 1972 alternate history novel The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad, which imagined if Adolph Hitler had become a pulp author expatriated to America rather than a politician in Weimar Germany.) One of the most prominent new writers, N.K. Jemisin, engaged readily with the legacy of the New Wave generation as well as the social gains of the Left over the past century, perhaps most hopefully in her provocatively-titled How Long ‘til Black Future Month? (2018)

    This development was simultaneous with a series of events in the fan community that demonstrated a simmering political divide within. From 2014-17, reactionary members of the World Science Fiction Convention formed a voting bloc within the polity that awards the annual Hugos, one of the major industrial accolades of the genre, as a result of alleged “biases” that “favored” multicultural authors and texts. The Sad Puppies and various progeny sought to promote right wing militarist fictions, some with explicit misogyny, racism, and homo-/trans-phobia. This bloc seemed to in hindsight be a microcosmic augury of the aggrieved Euro-American working class and petit bourgeois voters that flocked to Donald Trump’s explicit nativism during the 2015-16 presidential election. As these two currents came into contradiction with one another, it suggested a set of novel developments that would break with stale conventions, such as a pedestrian and sclerotic mainstreaming of postmodernist irony in high-grossing but otherwise superficial films like Disney/Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy.

    CONCLUSION

    With the coming of the new century’s second decade, multiculturalism and feminist ethics infused the genre alongside a distinctly new forecast, the impending impacts of cataclysmic global warming. A significant theme within not only dystopias but any texts dealing with the future includes contemplation of what climate change will mean for the species. Major motion pictures, such as the 2012 Cloud Atlas (dirs. The Wachowski Sisters and Tom Tykwer), 2017’s Bade Runner 2049 (dir. Denis Villeneuve), 2020’s Tenet (dir. Christopher Nolan), and multiple other texts envision a future where coastal flooding, food depletion due to crop loss, and social consequences of these developments play across the screen. Remaining pulp magazines, such as Asimov’s and Analog, regularly feature authors that include these themes in their imaginings. As the event that may become the prime concern of the homo sapien over the next half-century, ecological themes will continue to grow in prominence. It is possible to foresee a polarization that was articulated originally in the writings of Vermont’s eco-anarchist Murray Bookchin. On the Left there will appear a plea for egalitarian principles and radical emancipatory redistribution as basic resources, such as habitable land, potable water, and food supplies, decrease exponentially. The Right will take on features Bookchin detailed succinctly in a polemic about reactionary “deep ecology:”

    It was out of this kind of crude eco-brutalism that Hitler, in the name of ‘population control,’ with a racial orientation, fashioned theories of blood and soil that led to the transport of millions of people to murder camps like Auschwitz. The same eco-brutalism now reappears…among self-professed deep ecologists who believe that Third World peoples should be permitted to starve to death and that desperate Indian immigrants from Latin America should be exclude by the border cops from the United States lest they burden ‘our’ ecological resources… Deep ecology is so much of a black hole of half-digested, ill-formed, and half-baked ideas that one can easily express utterly vicious notions…and still sound like a fiery radical who challenges everything that is anti-ecological in the present realm of ideas. The very words deep ecology, in fact, clue is into the fact that we are not dealing with a body of clear ideas but with a bottomless pit in which vague notions and moods of all kinds can be such into the depths of an ideological toxic dump.

    Will textual authors evenly subdivide as they did around the Vietnam War half a century ago? Will progressive formations, bearing some resemblance to Popular Front assemblies of authors in the Depression and Second World War, devise a unified framework to profess opposition to this resurgent ethno-nationalism?

    The other challenge that the genre will confront is the digital paradigm and its re-formulation of text distribution networks. While the internet was originally formulated in science fiction, the systems of publication and distribution, as has been the case for all text genres, have encountered an adaptation challenge, with a large fraction of the industry still arrested in the analog traditions. Intellectual property and notions of textual ownership only form one half of the challenge. The other is a massive saturation of markets that render older distribution forms, such as periodicals and books, not so much obsolete as proportionally less valuable. What does it mean for a professionalized industry when it is flooded overnight with websites that feature free content, including fan-authored fictions about franchise characters that were previously exclusive to authorized writers and artists? How does one utilize the internet to generate profits for publication when the forces of monopolization, consolidation, and privatization of essential communications networks are concentrated so significantly in such powerful tech firms? The web-based magazine Clarkesworld, founded by editor Neil Clarke in October 2006, has explored a subscription paradigm heavily-dependent upon the e-book format with print issues as an auxiliary function that could point in one direction. Simultaneously, multiple periodicals have embraced the free podcasting system as a method of distribution, allowing readers to experience stories in an audio format that was previously a much more cost-prohibitive one.

    Perhaps there is a synthesis to be gleaned from the radical movements of the people in the new century. As a response to the American Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTEL-PRO) operated by police agencies, radicals in the new century have developed an innovative network of decentralized, horizontal systems of base-building and mobilization that provide strategic versatility. While these systems do carry their own challenges, such novelty might occasion a further fusion of the genre and politics in a way reminiscent of Edward Bellamy.

    WORKS CITED

    Bookchin, Murray. “Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology: A Challenge for the Ecology Movement.” Green Perspectives: Newsletter of the Green Program Project, 1987. Anarchy Archives, dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/socecovdeepeco.html.

    Butler, Andrew M. “Riding the New Wave.” The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, edited by Gerry Canavan and Eric Carl Link, Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 323–337.

    Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books, 2010.

    Graeber, David. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Melville House Publishing, 2016.

    Higgins, David M. “New Wave Science Fiction and the Vietnam War.” The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, edited by Gerry Canavan and Eric Carl Link, Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 415–433.

    Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991.

    Konstantinou, Lee. “Something Is Broken in Our Science Fiction: Why Can’t We Move Past Cyberpunk?” Slate Magazine, 15 Jan. 2019, slate.com/technology/2019/01/hopepunk-cyberpunk-solarpunk-science-fiction-broken.html.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.