Hollywood & Environmentalism
I’m sure somebody much smarter than me has already made this connection, but recently I have been thinking about how Hollywood blockbuster movies continually vilify individuals or groups that are opposed to the dominant form of society, regardless of whether or not these entities are actually making a valid argument about how our society should be reshaped. Many times, these villains have reasonable perspectives on how our society is flawed, but then Hollywood ramps them up to the extreme, by making them murderous, psychopathic, and evil — and the only solution to accomplish their goals is for humanity to die for their sins, rather than through the redistribution of power and wealth, or restructuring our society.
Let’s take Avengers: Age of Ultron for example. Ultron, having witnessed all the death and destruction caused by humans — believes that the only way to save the Earth, is through the eradication of humanity to give the planet a fresh start. This is fairly standard supervillain behaviour for a comic book action film, and it provides an ideal focal point for our heroes; yet, when you consider more closely whose actions have prompted Ultron’s wrath, it really shouldn’t be humanity as a whole that draws his attention. Bombing, conflicts, wars, and destruction have not been the result of your average, working-class person going about their daily life, it’s been a product of a ruling class attempting to accumulate or maintain wealth and power in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. Ultron was powerful enough, that he shouldn’t have felt it necessary to eradicate humanity to accomplish his goals, when he could have just forced corrupt leaders and the owners of capital into a restructuring of society that is more equitable for all.
In many of these cases, the reality is that humanity’s sins are caused by a ruling elite, yet the blame — and thus the target for the wrath of supervillains, is pushed onto humanity as a whole, which makes these villains come off as evil, as they should, despite potentially having understandable goals, it’s just that nobody should have to die in order to accomplish these goals.
We have seen this multiple times in recent years, with similar themes in other movies including Godzilla: King of the Monsters, where an eco-terrorist (portrayed by Charles Dance) awakens numerous monsters — including King Gidorah, upon the world in order to cleanse the Earth of humans and begin healing the planet from the damages we have caused. Or, in Avengers: Infinity War, where Thanos’ primary goal is to wipe out half the of life in the universe to prevent life from expanding unchecked, to bring balance to the universe, and provide a more sustainable future. Thanos had witnessed resource shortages due to overpopulation on his home world of Titan and wanted to prevent that from happening across the galaxy, by murdering(?) half of every being in existence.
Both of these examples show antagonists with valid concerns about the nature of human society under capitalism, but instead of focusing on the individuals which are giving humanity such a bad rap (i.e., corrupt politicians, wealthy business owners, industrial capitalists etc.), they decide to take their anger out on the entire human race. That’s no different than blaming me for the climate crisis. This then sets the stage for our heroes to show up, saves the day, and restore “normality” for our planet and/or the universe. Everyone leaves the experience happy, including both the characters in the film and the audience, and capitalism is free to continue as the dominant mode of production in whatever make believe version of Earth that we just watched for two and a half hours.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this is having a subtle downstream effect on our society as a whole, where some of these valid criticisms of how we exist in disharmony with each other, and the environment are suddenly associated with an evil figure and this could potentially make these concepts harder to accept for real people. It’s not that these villains are justified in their actions — they’re not. Their means don’t justify the ends. But the ends aren’t always terrible ideas within themselves. Thanos apparently just wanted a more sustainable universe — good, but his way of getting there involved killing half of our friends and family members — not good.
It’s almost as if the ruling class that own and/or run these film production studios are trying to make the broader public fear these valid criticisms of our society, by associating them with hyper villainous beings to make them less palatable for acceptance. They are conjuring up these bad guys — who embody the very ideas that capitalists don’t want us to believe are true. It’s as if they are asking themselves how they can associate good ideas with the worst possible characters to discourage people from believing in the validity of their messages, which opens up environmentalists or activists to increased skepticism from the public.
