Captain America is a weird one to include. Not denying it's propaganda, everything is, but throwing Cap in with copaganda is such a surface level take. He's propaganda for American exceptionalism sure, but also embodies it in an old school New Deal way. The character has been consistently anti-facist over the years.
Imo Iron Man is the much more harmful propaganda. You can pretty much draw a direct line between the characters rise in popularity thanks to the MCU and the rise of Elon Musk.
Any superhero movie is problematic. They all say that only a few special people can save the country and the world. The rest of the population just has to hold tight and let the important people do their thing. It's just a small step by replacing powers with wealth to give the rich carte blanche to do as they please.
Not those scenes in Spider-Man where New York throws random objects at the villain until they relent. Hell yeah solidarity.
Not to mention that a lot of those special people are born better
I wonder if that's a limit of storytelling. Grand social change is hard to film. Even team effort cohesion requires a lot of actors and writing to pull off.
No matter how sound the morals and story, if it's not entertaining, it might fail as mass media.
Oh I agree completely. There is a fascist aspect inherent to Superheroes. Cap is just one lf the less egregious ones.
He's still playing world police.
People kept calling Musk -- Stark because they thought he was a scientist/genius. Like the MCU fake tech was gonna be birthed out of this immature edge lord that steals people's idea with stolen money.
Yeah I kinda disagree with Cap as well. He also explicitly refutes the government to stand up what he believes is right in Civil War too.
Yep. If cops had the ethics / morals of cap we'd have zero issues with the police.
Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead.
Disco Elysium
You can enjoy TV shows and movies while knowing ACAB is the truth.
Really depends. Cops shows are really off putting to me. Marvel is kinda OK; not a fan, but it's so over the top that I can abstract from the propaganda.
For me now I think of it like a marvel movie.
This cop not shooting anyone is just like a man with superpowers swinging through the city on sci fi ropes.
It's nice to imagine.
You don't get it... its super
It's just innocuous entertainment.
Listening to the Super Earth Anthem doesn't make me want to drop a 380mm barrage over everything the Illuminate hold dear, or anything...
I like the myth of the police, not actual cops, I like Simon Pegg in Hot Fuzz, actual cops can suck a nard
"But they're just TV shows" "it's not that deep" etc. I would implore you to listen to this excellent episode of Citations Needed..
It covers how modern cop shows were invented directly to counter shows that portrayed defence lawyers as the protagonists, along with a general push to lionize the police state despite its inability to prevent crime or deliver real justice.
Bro thinks Startship Troopers is actual army propaganda.
You don't copy Leni Riefenstahl without making at least partly a fascist propaganda movie.
Didn't captain America literally become a fugitive of the state
He threw a tantrum because he didn't want public oversight over his and his friend's superpowers.
It was basically a "You're a loose canon, McBain" cop storyline.
You mean the solider who saw what happens when a list of everyone who is considered "other" is ordered and maintained by a government? All because, Tony "I am a gift to God" Stark and Bruce "Couldn't Say No" Banner created a nigh unstoppable police force with no oversight?
IMO, you're not wrong, but Magneto is the better portrayal.
Magneto was right all along about the persecution of mutants. Tony Stark and Captain America disagreed on a "who watches the Watchmen" level in the movies.
Stark thought that heroes had too much power to act without the approval of some higher authority, and the Captain believed that they should be able to act when and where they could without needing permission in order to do the most good. Magneto looked at the number he had tattooed on his wrist as a child in the camps and said, "Never again."
Copaganda
Crazy how much of this stuff is subsidized by or directly financed by the national security state. The most infamous, in my memory anyway, was the Transformers Franchise which got enormous access to US military staff and equipment during the shooting. The end result was a movie that felt more like one of those hookey 80s "Join the Marines" ads than a piece of action cinema.
The cop dramas are often like modern fantasy to me. There's different classes and quests. It doesn't reflect real life.
We're more aware of it now. Cop shows have always been about cops willing to break the rules, and they are made the heroes. This gave a whole generation an excuse to look at dirty cops as heroes doing what they needed to do
NGL CSI was my shit growing up. Though I was never deluded into believing that accurately reflected reality to any extent. ACAB
Where does stuff like Brooklyn 99 come in?
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Fetish content
I tend to lump it in with The West Wing as idealistic wish fulfilment of how we'd like things to be, or a picture of our human potential.
Moonie (Moon Channel) has a lovely 2h30 video on the topic of Kawaii: Anime, Propaganda, and Soft Power Politics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM2VIKfaY0Y
It focuses mostly on the eastern part of things, but it applies to stuff we end up consuming, too. Also worth quoting one of the top comments in the video:
I think you get one thing wrong, and that is claiming Japan is the #1 at projecting soft power. I'm sorry but the US is #1 and it isn't even a contest (coming from a non-American). The reason we don't really get the impression that the US is this soft power behemoth is because the US has been so proficient in projecting soft power that it has been normalized and integrated everywhere.
