Politics in Media - The Good, the Bad, and the Preachy

External threats, sure. Whether that's cold war communism or a martian invasion.

But civil wars, even if aggravated by outsiders, have their roots in local views and politics. So, as you say...

Look at, say, V for Vendetta and you can see where the fascists got their hooks in. And the criticism of them hits harder, if anything, because you can see their roots. IMO, of course.

Edited by Mrph1 on Apr 15th 2024 at 5:16:55 PM

Suspension of disbelief broken immediately at the thought of Texas being against a fascist constitution, unless when they say "fascist" they mean "you can't treat women and brown people like shit whenever you feel like it".

&Right, that's what I mean. And that kind of thing Texas may oppose and call "fascism", but then California definitely would not.

It could work if an enemy manages to threaten them both, or if their interests align.

Look at Nazi Germany and the U.S.S.R., for example; they were  ideologically opposite, and yet they managed to form a pact of non-aggression and economic cooperation, even if each party was preparing to betray the other.

Or even Germany and Imperial Japan, both systems hold each other in disdain, and yet they still managed to be allies.

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Countries can be quite pragmatic in times of war, and unless their economic  interests are completely opposite, compromise can be made, and yesterday's enemies can be today's friends and vice versa.

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Edit: Another example is the Muslim and Christian kingdoms in the Middle Ages, and later the Ottoman Empire and Europe.

Both groups considered each other infidels, and have completely opposite views about how society should be run.

Still, it didn't prevent rulers and kings from allying with each other, to fight against other Muslims and Christians.

Edited by jawal on Apr 15th 2024 at 5:46:16 PM

Over the idea of a Second US Civil War in fiction without offending anyone, I simply wrote a Second US Civil War in my books to show how much of the world in my novels is a Crapsack World.

Long story short, after the appearance of a giant alien ship that crashed into Afghanistan in 1985, followed by World War III from 1989 to 1991, the world was never the same with most countries banding together to create supernational unions and when many US citizens and servicemembers saw the consequences of helping create the New United Nations (the old UN being one of the first victims of the aforementioned Third World War), they revolted and created the New Confederacy of America with all of this propped up by the organization that helped rebuild the world after World War III by sharing technology reverse-engineered from the alien shipwreck in Afghanistan.

I'd argue that an alt-history scenario can justify a Texas-Cali alliance, the parties weren't always this divided.

Problem is that, in a timeline where California and Texas can be buddies, a Civil War just plain isn't happening.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Apr 15th 2024 at 10:03:54 AM

My problem with Civil War is that polarization = bad" is such an obvious message, and easily understood on an intellectual level. However, saying it's one thing, but doing something about it is another.

If you're a gay man say, how are you supposed to find common ground with the side of the aisle that wants to deny you the right to exist?

That seems to be a recurring theme with Hollywood figures, whether in their films and shows, or on social media posts. They say we should all just get along, but they don't even acknowledge what the conflict is over. Heck, many of them don't even seem to know what the polarization is over.

Or just don't want to acknowledge it.

Stories where both sides are equally awful can work, but they generally need to explain why they became awful.

Showing that they're horrible now without saying anything about how they got there carries a big element of "trust me bro" and risks shallow/problematic 'both sides'-ing of the sort frequently criticised in RL.

Edited by Mrph1 on Apr 15th 2024 at 7:44:30 PM

Its because 'taking a side' could (in theory) alienate someone in the audience and the overall the goal to make a movie with a 'message' thats delivered in a way that gets the maximum amount of watchers without being 'political'

I was going to say accessible but thats the wrong word to describe a work with a shallow premise designed to be super unoffensive.

x5 That's what I was bringing up when I talked about the "two men in a room" metaphor.

As Tolkien said, "It only takes one side to start a war." Compromise and finding common ground are all well and good, but when the issue at question is the right of certain people to continue living, well genocide and compromise are two words that don't exactly belong together.

The enemy gets a vote in whether or not you're at war.

unless it's ww2 and you're Poland declaring war on Japan.

(for those who haven't heard of this:)

Japan rejected declaration of War. Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō's answer was: "We don't accept the Polish declaration of war. The Poles, fighting for their freedom, declared war under the British pressure"

from Wikipedia

My issue with the premise that the exact causes of the war were left out to avoid causing controversy is that it assumes that being uncontroversial is one of the movie’s goals. Given the subject matter, that’s an obviously incorrect assumption.

There are levels of controversy, it can easily be said the movie was willing to be controversial by being about a second American civil war, but didn't want the controversy of stating the reasoning for it. Kind of a 'have your cake and eat it too' situation.

Alright gonna throw my hat into the ring.

We do not need to know why a civil war started for a movie to be compelling. In fact, there were no doubt millions of people if not more across history who were caught up in a civil war but never really understanding what a given civil war was actually about, akin to anybody caught in any sort of war and not knowing the exact reasons of what they were fighting for or why they were dying (think All Quiet on the Western Front).

If the movie wants to say that the reason a war started doesn’t matter and instead what matters is the wanton destruction and the basics of “war is hell” that is within the creators right to do so.

Mainly a lot of this discussion kind of suggests a lot of underlying anxiety and tension felt by people on both sides of the political spectrum in the USA who were hoping this would allow people to get a sense of validation that one side or the other is the enemy or that one political ideology (the one a given group despises) will lead to destruction. Some people want a movie that says “Donald Trump/Joe Biden/whatever and their party will destroy America and result in a civil war.” And thus they don’t like that Texas and California are on the same side since they see this as cowardice (putting aside that these two states have Republicans and Democrats within and that they aren’t entirely one political party throughout, and that suggesting that they are in fact one side or another doesn’t do anything to ease polarization.)

Now say that this is the case and the movie doesn’t want to offend either right wing or left wing audiences. What exactly is harmful about saying that either side should be afraid of democracy being overthrown and losing their right to partake in a democratic process and not having to partake in a civil war? Do you instead want the movie to say “to stop a civil war we have to destroy the enemy before a war can be declared?” Cause obviously the filmmaker isn’t interested in that story. The director probably has at least a modicum of faith that most people regardless of their party want America to stay… America.

TL:DR maybe the point of the movie is to say that war is bad, doesn’t matter why it starts. Call it cliche if you wish but don’t demonize it.

Edited by Patar136 on Apr 15th 2024 at 3:28:19 AM

I think that's the kicker: the incompatible ideas of the America different people want America to stay.

I feel like any movie that comes out in this day and age that's about a "second american civil war" knows what it's doing. It knows what anxieties it's tapping into with that very premise.

Now, movies should tap into the cultural zeitgeist of when it was made, but I feel like a lot of them try to be a bit more abstract than this.

Like, Spielberg's War of the Worlds taps into the fears of a Post-9/11 America. A lot of the movie's imagery and theming are based off of that event and the impact it had on the American psyche in the aftermath.

What that movie wasn't about was a literal terrorist attack that destroyed the International Commerce Paviliaon on the 11th of the 9th, perpetrated by the Judao Christian Islamist Alliance.

Edited by GNinja on Apr 15th 2024 at 11:12:42 AM

As I've said before, I think the problem is that handling the topic of a civil war in an "apolitical" manner in the current day is a bit tone-deaf. A failure to read the room, if you will.

I think that would have worked 10 years ago, but the current political climate being what it is, it just sort of falls flat.

In fairness, I would actually argue that if the movie was too overtly partisan, it would have the opposite problem of being too on the nose. Like, I would be pretty skeptical of a movie where Trump is the Big Bad trying to overthrow the government. You'd need a layer of separation there.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Apr 15th 2024 at 4:18:55 AM

I mean, the movie seems to be quite successful (at least so far) so I'm not really sure a claim that it's failed to read the room makes sense?

So you're saying that in order to read the room, it has to pick a side in our current political climate?

That seems to be against the point the movie is trying to make.

In terms of TV shows handling the war theme, do you think that Avatar: The Last Airbender did a better job at portraying the anti-war theme?

Ah man, I totally missed the fascism discussion.

I've been very interested in and learning more about fascism for past few months. As part of the process, I'm currently reading Hitler a two-volume biography of the eponymous figure by Ian Kershaw, and The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton.

Yup.

The rail system of Italy was already going through reparation even before Mussolini took power...and even after that, the trains didn't actually run on time.

If fascism really had some efficient aspects as claimed, the Italian military forces during the World War II wouldn't have been so horrendously incompetent and inefficient.

In fact, as pointed out in works like How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley, fascism by its nature can't really work efficiently in, well, any kind of field at long term. After all, it's a system that constantly promotes division and infighting, something that Hitler often promoted within his own Nazi Party and the Wehrmacht.

To stay more on topic, one of the core aspects of fascism that I don't often see portrayed well in media, is the call for return to the idealized past. And I don't just mean the "glory/good old days", I'm talking about something more specific, as in a mythicalized history that is also hierchial and patriarchial.

That said, I do acknowledge how it's not exactly the easiest thing to portray, yeah.