Lately I have been watching a friend play BioShock Infinite, something to which I paid little attention at the time of its release. At first the setting and the story were attracting me, as they pertain to my field of interest… but later in the story, after acquainting us with an archetypal capitalist, I noticed that the story was getting a little ‘darker’—in a familiar way—and it soon devolved into what I feared: another subplot about how much revolution sucks.
I’ve seen it already in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and Metro 2033, so I know how it goes: first the writers lure you in with a display of the prerevolutionary situation, and at first they portray the revolutionaries positively, but as the climax approaches the revolutionaries go around suddenly committing atrocities without any clear rhyme or reason, nothing can be done to prevent it, ordinary people hate it (so the revolutionaries abuse them too), and the lesson is that revolution is no better than the prerevolutionary situation.
Why do revolutionaries go through the trouble of making revolution? Not because the material conditions (whatever those are) made revolution inevitable, no. It’s because revolutionaries are stupid and unreasonable. Simple as that. That’s probably also why they commit atrocities, and also why they can’t figure out how to keep their supporters without resorting to coercion or violence.
The message, it seems, is an advertisement for conservatism: ‘Yes, we’ll admit that things may be awful now, but no matter how awful they may be, anything else would be worse, so just shut up and do nothing.’ They don’t state it outright—possibly because of how embarrassing it would look—but that is the only conclusion that I can draw. (Otherwise, the only alternatives are either that the writers wanted to subject innocent people to their angsty, immature whining, or they simply wanted to waste their time, both of which would be bafflingly unwise of them.)
Is there anything inaccurate about my observation? Because otherwise, I don’t know why these presumed professionals would suddenly subject us to this lazy and shallow writing.
The MCU has become waaaay more pro-status quo since its beggining
I doubt we would even get something like Captain america 2 nowadays
Funny you should mention that particular movie. See, they did an oopsie there, what with having Hydra being in charge of US intelligence community, sowing chaos worldwide to ensure their new order is accepted and all that.
Thing is, if you pause for even a minute after that, you’ll find yourself thinking “wait, if USA and shield have been under the bad guys since the 1950’s at least, doesn’t that mean USSR were the good guys?”
The studio must have realised that as well, because they’ve backtracked in the third movie. They’ve introduced a stereotypical russkie bad guy character (ever noticed how they’re always made ugly?), a secret hydra base in Russia, those secret super soldier assassins, etc etc. All for the single purpose - to wash away the concerns.
I think that the movie has a “libertarian” vibe to it. In the end, Steve speeches are how they will defeat the government because he believes in “freedom” and trust “individuals”, so I’d say it’s the classic broken clock that is right twice a day.
And in the end they destroy SHIELD but keep the Avengers and every other government institution running, so the problem was never the status quo, the problem is that it was not the “true america” because it was full of nazis 🤓
Ironicaly Captain America 2 is partially responsible for my radicalization bc its the reason I know Edward Snowden and his revelations about NSA
That’s actually an excellent point, regarding the individualism of it. Thanks!