Plenty of literature exists on the relationship between Hollywood and the United States government, and on how this relationship influences media content to propound a pro-US bias. However, there has not been much study on the recent rise in films on the flip side of the coin: ones that criticize the neoliberal world order to varying degrees.
The most recent in this "genre" of movies is James Gunn's The Suicide Squad, one of the best-received films of the 2021 summer. The Suicide Squad, not to be confused with the critically-panned Suicide Squad (2016), is a violent action-comedy centering around a team of criminals sent on an impossible and dangerous mission. Understanding the critiques that The Suicide Squad makes regarding the United States and the limitations of those critiques provide important insights into the role of media critical of the status quo.
There are plenty of on-the-nose critiques of US imperialism sprinkled throughout the film. The fictional island that the Suicide Squad has been tasked to invade, Corto Maltese, is strikingly similar to several Latin American countries in which the US has meddled since the end of World War II. In addition, we learn that the US government collaborated with Nazi scientists in a project known in the film as Project Starfish. This project is eerily reminiscent of the real-life Operation Paperclip, which involved the United States granting amnesty to and recruiting Nazi scientists to defeat the USSR in the space race.
In the film, the Corto Maltese government uses dissidents as test subjects for Project Starfish with the support of the US. This resembles the complicity of the United States in the suppression of dissent in Latin American dictatorships such as Chile under Pinochet. If we extend this metaphor even further, it is also representative of the proclivity of the United States for backing fascist and far-right movements or groups in countries that embrace explicitly leftist or communist politics.
This connection is especially relevant today regarding the crisis in Afghanistan. In the 1990s, the United States funded the Mujahideen, whose most powerful members, including Osama Bin-Laden and Mohammed Omar, would form the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. This group toppled a pro-Soviet government that had introduced universal education, equal rights for women, and marriage reform. After decades of brutal military occupation that has taken hundreds of thousands of Afghan lives and the subsequent resurgence of the Taliban, it is an understatement to say that material conditions would have been better for Afghans if the United States had never intervened.
US foreign policy, more accurately described by the term "imperialism," seems to be best embodied by John Cena's character, The Peacemaker, who proclaims, "I cherish peace with all of my heart. I don't care how many men, women, and children I kill to get it."
Finally, the film also contains a brief critique of the prison-industrial complex, which is especially notable in a time of institutional counter-revolution against the George Floyd rebellion for racial justice last summer. Unfortunately, aside from a few shows such as Ava DuVernay's When They See Us, very little popular, well-financed entertainment actively challenges the carceral state. Criticisms of the prison system and the police are rare in Hollywood, which churns out endless consistently low-quality “copaganda” each year. Thus, The Suicide Squad's condemnation of society's treatment of people we deem "irredeemable" is bold.
However, the Suicide Squad also demonstrates the limitations of anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist art financed by a multinational, corporate machine. Like in the actual US military, the Suicide Squad kills countless innocent civilians, yet the movie presents these deaths in a comedic light. Of course, not every piece of media has to be grim, dark or hyper-realistic, and the film shows the people killing innocents as bad guys, but inflicting the same sort of fictional violence upon white, American civilian characters would have certainly cooked up significant controversy. The same white supremacist culture and logic that presents the deaths of people of color on screen for entertainment is the same one that allowed the US government to dehumanize the Vietnamese people and drop billions of barrels of Agent Orange on them without hesitation. And for all of its critiques of US imperialism, it is American intervention that saves the day at the end of The Suicide Squad.
The Suicide Squad is a crucial case study; it embodies many of the triumphs and weaknesses that anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist movies have. It is undeniable that criticisms of capitalism and racism have ironically become profitable for movie studios. Although many of these movies offer valid and often bold criticisms of the status quo, the lack of an alternative vision is striking. The most prominent examples are Parasite, Snowpiercer, The Wolf of Wall Street, and Judas and the Black Messiah, and the TV show Squid Game also falls into this category.
While all of these works offer biting criticisms of the status quo, the resolutions of all involve hopelessness and despair, emphasizing the unbreakable cyclical nature of capitalism. Is this because screenwriters cannot envision a future without white supremacy, neoliberalism, and racial capitalism? Or are there institutional constraints preventing radical filmmakers from receiving funding or script approval for films that might express an alternative vision for the future? These questions become even more critical when considering that six corporations control 90% of media in the United States.
Nowhere is this phenomenon better illustrated than in the second episode of the show Black Mirror. In the climax, the protagonist places a shard of glass at his throat and rants against the evils of the society he inhabits. This expression of dissent becomes a television show, an outlet to express criticism against the system without fundamentally altering it in any way. Perhaps, anti-capitalist films, anti-racist films, and the rare anti-imperialist films--unintentionally or otherwise--are serving the role of reinforcing the system by providing an acceptable outlet to let out the steam of living in a hyper-individualist, neoliberal, and violent society.
Despite the rapid consolidation of major media outlets over the past few decades, radical media has seen a resurgence. The most popular of these has been Means TV, "the world's first worker-owned streaming service." Of course, the ethical consumption of commodities will not solve our most pressing economic and racial issues. However, these media sources offer the platforming of voices, ideas, art, and stories that would not have been considered viable in mainstream media.
Media consolidation has narrowed the realm of acceptable opinion in public debate. When our media is crafted and monopolized by six corporations with explicit imperialistic and capitalistic agendas, independent media emerges as a crucial vessel through which we can ensure that people in power and unjust systems are not free from critique.