Maybe the answer is more obvious than I think, but I don’t know how to explain it.
It seems like since at least the 1990s (if not the late 1980s) the default antagonists in realistic, contemporary settings have not been governments or nation‐states, but foreign terrorists. You can find this trope in almost anything modernistic, from 24 to Bad Boys to Call of Duty sequels to the Diehard series to James Bond sequels to obscurities like Nuclear Strike to the Soldier of Fortune series to Syphon Filter to Lady‐only‐knows how many Tom Clancy books/films/games/shows/songs/baseball cards. Hardly anybody seems to find anything weird about this.
What is so fascinating about foreign terrorists?
It was part of an attempt to manufacture consent for the ‘war on terror’ that led to the deaths of millions of Middle Eastern people for crimes that they did not commit. That trend expanded into a more general US as world police narrative that remains popular to this day as it continues to be useful to the ruling classes for increasing profits for companies like Lockheed Martin which many of the ruling classes have shares in.
Almost everyone globally dislikes terrorists—especially if they’re seen as foreign, since then it doesn’t challenge the viewer or their perspectives in any way. As such, international release requires no localization whatsoever if generic terrorists are the bad guys. Plus there’s a minimal chance for controversy. The movies that you have in mind are not written as artwork by individuals trying to make some kind of greater statement. It’s a product. Occasionally, a product happens to have artistic value but that’s not especially common.
Furthermore (and this is honestly completely speculation) unless the US govt starts just giving huge amounts of money directly to Hollywood, we’re unlikely to see the demonization of China the way the USSR was demonized previously. Maybe Russia for a bit, but once everything dies down and Hollywood movies can be shown in Moscow again, it’ll be back to the way it was before.
Maybe Russia for a bit, but once everything dies down and Hollywood movies can be shown in Moscow again, it’ll be back to the way it was before.
Showing movies in Moscow didn’t stop Hollywood from shitting out garbage like “Red Sparrow” and latest Kingsman movie.
No doubt, but there seems to be a trend to me—though I’m someone who isn’t especially invested in blockbusters. China is really the more important factor considering that their domestic films now have essentially identical production values to their Hollywood counterparts and are starting to be exported like American films. I have to imagine the US film industry is quite concerned about losing ground. But again this is conjecture, so take it for what it’s worth.
Of course, of course. This is actually why I suspect we won’t see much “China bad” and Chinese antagonists getting killed on screen for some time still, despite the rabid rhetorics of the Washington officials.
At the same time, Russia is a smaller market, and Russians are still seen as “hwite”, so making us the go-to antagonists in blockbusters doesn’t risk revenue too much, nor does it risk any accusations of racism towards the film industry, however deserved it may be.
IDK what would Chinese blockbuster-going audience think about Russians portrayed as baddies of the week though.
Pop culture derives from larger material forces at play and seeks to legitimize and reinforce those. The US is at war with X, therefore media naturally follows and portrays the enemy as some variation of X. Some of it is manufactured consciously (MoD obviously), some of it is just financial incentives. People are interested in current thing, naturally want their media to “wrestle” with current thing and tend to consume media “wrestling” with current thing, so companies pump that stuff out because it sells.
There’s nothing inherently fascinating about terrorists, that was just the current thing for the last 2 decades and therefore created attention, because it felt relevant. It also constantly created and reinforced an easy good-bad dichotomy of the conflicts those narratives were based on and that’s nice too.
Just watch the terrorist antagonist fade away and producers moving to the Russian threat again.
I recommend this Parenti lecture on propaganda in entertainment media https://youtu.be/S33DKRcqvkQ
Its a horrible mix of Orientalism and White Man’s Burden style thinking to reinforce the white supremacist capitalist overlord neoliberal Amerikkkan dictatorship.
The idea essentially “Those dirty brown peo-pull are resisting the U.S. Army raping their country’s people and natural resources for our corporate profits. They are in the wrong for defending themselves, so its okay to bomb the Global South. Whatever problems we have are either the fault or worse than those dirty savages have going on!”
Drives my piss to a boil.
Fast and Furious, for instance. It was originally about an undercover pig who decided to assist working class or lumpenproletariat drivers in resisting organized crime.
And now the latest movies show the main characters actively working for the CIA and Interpol fascists.
Or like how in the video game series Mirror’s Edge, you play as a badass courier trying to rescue her sister from pigs. And then in Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst, the Black Panther-like Black November resistance movement is portrayed as being selfish demagogues that are sociopathic and chaotic, and being almost as bad as the pigs and capitalists they resist.
I think it’s just lazy writing. You need bad guys for the story and terrorists fill that criteria well enough.
“Fighting terrorism” is also the usual pretext for US aggression, so the years of propaganda might have affected the way people think about the bad guys trope.
The eventual extrajudicial and unusual killing of the bad guy is justified if they’re the personification of evil itself as a maverick ideologue terrorist. If these action movie heroes were ripping the arms off a soldier following orders, that might betray how cruel the main characters are acting even in the name of justice, and we wouldn’t want that now would we?
Ends should always justify the means.
because racism
