Actually the general premise behind Fight Club is anarcho-primalism. A return to tribal behavior and a hatred for industry.
It is a good movie for the end of the bloody 20th century. Kind of a summation. I don’t think it is necessarily a celebration, a bit of parody or satire.
Yeah, there was lots of anti-consumerism (especially the whole bit about IKEA). EDIT: Personally, what I don’t like about anti-consumerism is the tirade that attempts to say that value and preferences is universal and not subjective.
Exactly, remember when they are on the bus and see the Calvin Klein poster and say ‘Is that what a man is suppose to look like?’
Citizen Kane - wasn’t that good.. (my opinion) but also anti wealth / prosperity in nature. Kind of had a John Galbraith deal going on.
Fight Club - http://mises.org/daily/327 … along with the whole, violating the NAP as a major part of the whole thing. As well as the good objections listed above by others.
Here is a review by Mr T. There are a lot of good parts in it… and some not so good.
With movies like this.. it relies on the interpretation or aspects that are highlighted to make the case for your ‘side’. The point of this list is to provide movies that can be used for raising these issues after watching the movies with friends, loved ones etc.
You could argue that the police are corrupt, the only way the mafia can be so powerful is with prohibition and that they need a private citizen to stop the Joker.
With training day I get the corruption and drug war aspect. Anything else?
And Changeling was added.
Will check those out. [:)]
It’s in the Revolution / Anti-Occupation section… and Terrorism one. Great film indeed.
Additionally, what do people think of Panic Room?
Arrested Development (2003) the tv series should be there. It takes a shine at a lot of things. Military, patriot act, the Iraq war and corporate fraud as well as lawyers. Also add incompetent cops and church among many other things.
And above all its just unbelievably funny.
Categorize,
Cinderella Man (2005) - Individualist
Add,
Beyond Rangoon (1995) - Revolution
The World’s Fastest Indian (2005) - Individualist
The Island (2005) - Sci-Fi
Hotel Rwanda (2004) - Antiwar
FYI Fight Club was one of the worst movies I have ever seen.
Add Ikiru (1952); Japanese movie about the life of a bureaucrat, finding out he has 6 months to live and then realizes he hasn’t ever done anything in his work-life. Then he tries to take on a project and you see how corrupt and dead the system is.
Categorie: anti-state.
Add Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984); *“*Warrior/pacifist Princess Nausicaä desperately struggles to prevent two warring nations from destroying themselves and their dying planet”.
I wrote a rather lengthy review of it a while back which you can find here. Safe to say I don’t consider it a libertarian film.
So? Almost no movies have anything to do with anarchism. So whether it has any anarchist characters is irrelevant to the catagories presented.
The Dark Night can go in either Conspiracy / Corruption or Justice. Batman represents private security and defense where the state has failed.
yeap
Batman represents the CIA (secret powers, interrogations, somehow always involved in destruction, believes that putting criminals behind bars is the ultimate justice, is viewed very badly by the public but yet is ultimately ‘needed’ and ‘good’). And the joker is the perfect myth to support the need for the CIA (psychotic maniac only interested in suffering and destruction, and no other motive).
Batman has at least one rule that I’m aware of. Don’t kill.
Really? So what part of the government is Wayne Enterprises in the fictional DC universe?
As opposed to what? Letting criminals free to steal other’s property or physically assault and kill others?
This is the most ridiculous analogy I have ever heard of, you are attempting to assign state powers to a private individual. It is absolutely absurd and illogical.
From what I remember, the government, or at least the police, hated the Batman because of how successful Batman was at stopping crime, etc. Also, the series usually portrayed city officials as corrupt.
Maybe, but is it a “must see” movie? If we are trying to trimm down the list I would scratch Batman out as it is just an action flick.
I think Fight Club is a perfect movie for the end of the bloody 20th century and its love of violence and war and its statism and bureaucracy. It started with imperialism and WWI, and this is how it all ended up. By the end the main character has started to regain his sanity. He felt trapped by a corrupt system - but we agree they system is corrupt. Also his job seemed morally dubious, but I’m hazy there. I don’t take the movie as prescriptive of a healthy way of life but satire descriptive of an unhealthy way of life.
Not sure what else is needed to justify Training Day. It is an amazing performance.
I do think it makes a very interesting case against the drug war. The main cop uses drug war rhetoric to justify himself and this brings in to question whether it is possible to fight the drug war without tyranny and corruption. How else could one be slightly effective? It could be looked at as just one crooked cop - but I think it shows that the system is the problem and an effective vice cop is a crooked one. As Macaulay said Tyranny and Corruption go together, and people who love the tyranny but dislike the corruption are compounding their evil with foolishness.
I’d add no country for old men to that list.
It’s anti-state in a more subtle way in addition to it being a perfect movie all around. If any more ever deserved a 100% on the tomatometer, no country would be it.
The mythology of the Dark Knight is to suggest that there exist unstoppable evil people who have no motive but to create terror. That’s why they are terrorists; not freedom fighters or anything worth investigating. This is why you didn’t see anything about the history of the joker and instead he pops out of nowhere.
The proposed solution in the movie is that to deal with unstoppable evil, we need super secret powerful heroes of our own. All the police is completely powerless against this evil, and for some reason or another the evil guys always have endless resources at their disposal and can accomplish anything they want, that’s just how evil works, you see.
That is the kind of mythology that supports secret state power. Secret powers like the CIA. Everybody knows the CIA does crazy stuff. And everybody rather not talk about it. Why? Because they ultimately support super secret hero powers. You see, the CIA are really the good guys. They represent the good. And that’s their only motivation.
The audience eats this stuff up. Just like every other cop movie where selfless underpaid officials risk their lives about 10 times a day, just so that they can catch the bad guys.
These type of mythologies are completely divorced from reality. In reality, people do things for a reason. In reality, people become a certain way for a reason. Most movies, even quite evil ones, still portray some kind of historical reason why things ended up this way. For example in the latest Star Trek movie, they show how the planet of the bad guys was destroyed and they lost all their loved ones, and that sent them in an irrational rage so that they wanted to create the same agony for the people they believed were responsible. At least, that’s how the ‘good guys’ portrayed the history. But even if that story didn’t make any sense whatsoever (1. What the hell were those people doing on that planet, if they know billions of years in advance that their solar system will collapse and they have starships and all that. 2. Sucking up a star into a tiny black hole? So then you have no star and your planet flies about in space randomly, and you have no heatsource. who says you can’t survive at 30 kelvin?), at least they showed the (supposed) causes of the problems, which is really what creating peace and harmony is about: understand what goes wrong and prevent that from happening. In the Dark Knight there no insight into this whatsoever and the evil was portrayed as psychotic and unstoppable.
That’s a very very dangerous mythology and it describes perfectly what the problem in the world today is: no analysis of any problems (causally) and totally emotionally reactionary, and clamoring to power.