The Empty Rebellions of Hollywood: One Symptom of Self-Preservation
It is no surprise to see Hollywood shapeshifting once again — its skin warping and fluctuating but remaining as damp and mechanical beneath the veneer as ever. Hollywood loves to take fashionable nuggets of what it deems as culturally-relevant concepts, and then pepper their films with them to disguise the blandness and downright ugliness that most audiences are usually served. Sadly, this is the nature of the beast — spectacle and false relevance is how the industry functions; it distracts viewers from the poisonous ideological rhetoric and commercial triteness that their films often possess. Hollywood’s latest venture towards self-preservation has become acutely attached to the ideas of rebellion and revolution; of youthful revolts and passionate calls for social justice. You can practically hear the hoorah of the many who see this move as a success for representation in the mainstream, that the issues which many have been calling for have finally found an international platform via Hollywood cinema — yet these representations are hollow at best.
Teenage rebellion en masse saw its big break following the post-Potter YA fiction trend in commercial literature, eventually finding its way into commercial cinema with the likes of The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner leading the pack. These films were wildly successful, tapping into a global and largely adolescent audience that sought to feed off these glorified images of rebellion and millennial camaraderie — albeit those images were drenched in cinematic cosmetics and star-studded casting. It is undeniably refreshing to see a modern generation on the screen pushing against the unfair and dismissive calls of the previous who blame their own socio-economic failings on our fondness for avocados and spiced lattes. Yet these renderings reek of superficiality — its saturation across media, in television and literature as much as cinema, is surely testament to this. The only reason these ideas have found themselves into mainstream visual media is because they are perceived as a marketable trend by the studios themselves, holding the kind of valuable expressive imagery that can help restore that tarnished studio gloss. These glamourised and simplified chunks serve to help Hollywood’s survival after yet another revelation of the cesspit of racism, patriarchal nepotism, and sexual depravity that it has become/has always been/will likely remain.
To allow Hollywood to turn images of rebellion and revolution into consumerist products is to allow them to undermine the reasons why revolutions are necessary in the first place, presenting notions of emancipation and revolt that are twisted in favour of shallow neoliberalism and often regressive political mechanics. One of the worst recent offenders is Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, a film which is horrendously problematic enough with its creepy sexual politics. The celebrated rebellion in the film is targeted at stopping Innovative Online Industries (known as IOI) who attempt to use their corporate wealth and manpower to find ‘easter eggs’ in the OASIS, a massive online virtual-reality world that almost everyone is hooked-up to as a form of escapism, distancing themselves from the truths of their crumbling reality. These ‘easter eggs’ are hidden puzzles, left there by its deceased creator James Halliday. Those who find all three of them inherit the OASIS. The rebellion, alongside the help of the film’s protagonist Wade Watts, inevitably succeed in their task — they get the better of IOI and Wade Watts becomes the OASIS’ new owner. So, what does this rebellion achieve exactly? Ownership of both the OASIS and the company which runs it is handed down to Watts and Art3mis, the leader of the rebellion who has now become Watts’ partner. Occasionally, they shut it down so that the two of them can make love. IOI still exists but is simply restructured. The world around them — seemingly on the verge of collapse — remains in such a state, with no implication that any meaningful changes will occur. The point of the rebellion was not for the benefit of the outside world, for the billions stuck in poverty caused by the sheer wealth disparity upheld by these digital monopolies, but for the preservation of the very vehicles of distraction that prevents reality from changing. It is quite remarkable to witness a film both clearly illustrate the sources of capitalist oppression and yet remain completely blind to it, almost as if it were suckered in by its own consumerist fairy-tale. It attempts to justify the idea of rebellion within dangerously obtuse terms, divorcing it from its real-world necessity and turning it into something pro-consumerist and utterly ignorant.
Disney, a far-from-pure company with a now practical monopoly over the world of contemporary big-screen entertainment, also stands accused of sprinkling its films with these rebellious treats for audiences to blindly chew on. In its most recent attempt at a Star Wars spin-off, Solo: A Star Wars Story, we are introduced to the character of L3–37 — Lando Calrissian’s gutsy droid companion with a passion for droid’s rights activism. The character has received a fair amount of attention in the media, with many praising L3–37 as an embodiment, for both franchise and studio, of a radical new obligation towards social justice and female representation. The issue is that this is simply not the case. L3–37 is a weak token character, used to convince audiences that the film, and the studio around it, is somehow more progressive with her inclusion — even though the film is a by-the-numbers action slog with reinforced heteronormative values and an array of uninspired stock characters and narrative cliches. Even worse however is how her impassioned roars for robo-justice are often the subject of ridicule by the film itself. Lindsey Romain in her piece on the film rightfully points out that:
“There were moments where it felt like the script was purposely telling the trolls who shout “SJW” on Twitter that they were right all along, that women are nothing more than robots spouting off what they’ve been programmed by the media to believe”.
Her actions ultimately lead to her death. After this, she is stripped of her agency and hooked-up to the Millennium Falcon, forever becoming a slave to the will of her biological companions. Many have been duped into thinking that Solo represents something more revolutionary and progressive through the presence of L3–37’s impassioned rebelliousness, yet in reality, her trials become a regressive and condescending symbol for the film’s prejudicial message of the futility of both social justice and the subversion of conservative values. As such, Solo becomes a film that appears to openly mock progressive ideologies while still managing to sucker people into believing that it is progressive.
Ready Player One’s Pepsi-commercial-style take on rebellion and Solo’s narrow-minded cinematic trickery are but just two puddles in a vast mire of corporate-tinged “activism”. Their presence and constant re-emergence in mainstream cinema is something of an insult to the history of revolutionary movements, both on-screen and in the tangible world. When cinema itself is renowned for its revolutionary and revelatory potential — from the Utopianism of Eisenstein’s montage-laced Soviet features to the works of Solanas and Getino whose uncompromised realism and aesthetic urgency mirrored the anti-colonial revolutionary fervour felt across Latin America at the time — it becomes a saddening sight to find the medium manipulated in such a way that this potential is limited. Simply left to stagnate, it allows people to become disillusioned and ignorant of the true legacy of revolutionary politics. Their transgressive and inherently cinematic qualities are appropriated and moulded into a false mask — hiding the darker legacy of corruption, phallocentrism, and corporate greed that perpetually reverberates through the studio hall and executive hotel suites of Hollywood’s elite.
