For the second time (I previously covered
Medium Cool in August, in
light of the Democratic convention), I am turning my public platform over to
Left of the Movies, my nascent political cinema podcast. The episode
offers five-to-ten minute capsules of some of the most hyped films of 2019:
Quentin Tarantino's reimagining-Manson late sixties dream
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Martin Scorsese's possibly apocryphal
Hoffa portrait
The Irishman, Todd Phillips' controversial
DC-meets-gritty-seventies-crime-film reboot of
Joker, and Bong
Joon-ho's Best Picture-winning architectural horror portrait of inequality
Parasite. All four films climax with violence that can be viewed
through a class-based lens - destruction as an almost ritualistic way to
either destablize or reinforce the social order. My discussion focuses on how
these climaxes express their respective films' political visions.
The bulk of this episode was originally recorded in January 2020 but in the
wake of Donald Trump's contentious loss, the Black Lives Matters protests and
left-right clashes in the street, the coronavirus pandemic and its unequal
economic fallout, and the electoral defeat of Bernie Sanders' populist
movement in the Democratic primaries, it seemed like a good idea to revisit
these films again in the light of such a world-historic ten months. So I
recorded an extra ten or so minutes extending the previous discussion,
including Trump supporters' image of him (vis a vis Hoffa and the Mafia in The
Irishman), the irony of "white male rage" Joker anticipating the BLM
protests six months later, and especially the way that all of these films
explore individual outbursts rather than collective action. There's still much
to dig into, so I hope some of the listeners will offer feedback that I can
further engage in upcoming episodes.
LINKS FOR EPISODE 10
New on Patreon
(for $1/month)