[lbo-talk] Re:anti-capitalist films?

B. docile_body at yahoo.com
Mon Jun 20 13:19:54 PDT 2005


Chuck0 wrote:
> > "I miss the anti-capitalist moment of 1999, which
brought us Fight Club, The Matrix, and American Beauty."

I can see an anti-capitalist angle on The Matrix. When it first came out it seemed to clearly be about humans being used [literally] as expendable units in production [they were held as batteries], inundated with an ideology [the matrix itself] that kept them from being fully cognizant of their actual situation. The sequels ruined it all, though, and began getting into murky Jungian archetype stuff.

Fight Club I never saw as anti-capitalist though the black-clad 'terrorist' group in it seems to have inspired at least one black bloc. The one thing about Fight Club that warrants remembering is the rebels are all-male, very much concerned about being 'emasculated' by society [in other words, one of their primary grievances seems to be that they can't be 'men' in this world], and their subversive black-clad group is extremely patriarchal and hierarchical, with the Brad Pitt character as the kind of man's man of a cult leader.

American Beauty -- a lot of older white guys really seemed to like that movie. The white male patriarch [Spacey] bucks authority at his job and gets it on with the nubile young babe, meanwhile defying his oppressive, nagging wife. I dunno....

-B.



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