
(some thoughts on apolitical cinema) (spoilers ahead for both movies)
Yes, I did use a four-year-old Daft Punk song to awkwardly fit in the titles of two films I saw recently. As you can probably tell, I am not the best at clever film essay titles. Hopefully this is something that I will improve at with practice. And yes, I am somehow going to draw connections of a political nature between these two very different and seemingly incongruous films.
I would not even be thinking of these connections if it weren’t for the time and place in which I currently live. If these films came out during the Obama era, if the civil rights of millions of people weren’t being trampled by the current administration on a daily basis, maybe I could have watched these two films in peace. Maybe I could have, as a friend admonished me, “just enjoyed these movies for the craft,” banishing any sociopolitical ruminations from my mind.
But I don’t, and if I’m to be real, none of us truly live in an apolitical world. Even without Trump or the threat of a neo-Nazi movement, even during Obama’s presidency (which we all now wistfully look back at in our collective rearview mirror), we were rife with battles on an ideological front. As activists will constantly remind you, we never lived in a post-race or post-sexist world, so to pretend we ever did is pure ignorance of reality.
And even still, maybe I wouldn’t even be thinking of these connections if I hadn’t recently listened to an episode of Still Processing, a wonderfully thoughtful and entertaining podcast by New York Times culture writers Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris, about S-Town (a podcast episode about another podcast: how meta-millennial). In this episode, Wortham expresses her disappointment that the podcast’s narrator and writer, Brian Reed, never really confronted his own whiteness, nor the whiteness of the Alabama town in which the podcast’s subjects live, and what that means to a biracial woman who grew up in Alabama. I’ve attempted my best to transcribe her words below, as I’m unable to find more eloquent phrasing than hers, and I also highly recommend listening to the full episode for better context:
I felt like I was being conditioned to romanticize and think very particularly about that Southern accent, which I think we do — it does actually feel very exotic to people who aren’t around that very much. This is the accent of my youth…all of my family speaks this way. It turns out [this accent] is associated with early, early antebellum times…you get into all these discussions of American individualism and national identity and white national identity, and the disappearance of that accent, which you are listening to for about 8 hours, is also associated with the very same rhetoric of all the white nationalist politics this podcast is very much steeped in, but chooses deliberately not to talk about. I was extremely troubled by the way [Brian] chooses to gloss over the KKK. He doesn’t engage with his own whiteness … Whiteness is not monolithic, he’s trying to say, but he doesn’t actually engage with what the white identity of this town is. So as a listener who thinks about their identity and that stuff all the time, including parts of their white identity, I found it very disingenuous. And I also found it really problematic. [S-Town is] about how whiteness is front and center, [but] we don’t really engage with it whatsoever. … A country accent like this feels like home to me. But home to me is laden with the KKK and cosplaying racial violence.
These thoughts rattled in my head as I watched Logan Lucky, a cute, fun heist movie by Steven Soderbergh in the vein of his previous hit heist movie, Ocean’s Eleven. The movie, set in West Virginia, is careful to paint its redneck protagonists as intelligent, well-meaning blue-collar folk, who in the end, are all just really proud of being West Virginian. I mean, the emotional high point of the movie even hinges on that last bit.
But, like S-Town, Logan Lucky manages to ignore the actual political changes fomenting in West Virginia. Since the 1990s, West Virginia has begun to vote increasingly Republican, culminating in a 2016 election in which all 55 counties voted for Trump, 43 of which voted overwhelmingly for him by 70% or more. The president even held a rally there earlier this month, along with the not-so-jawdropping news that Democratic Governor Jim Justice is heel-turning towards the Republican party. Now, better writers than I have gone at length about why Trump voters are by definition racist, but if you need any more proof that some form of racism is real and alive in Appalachia and the Rust Belt, look no further than West Virginian Trump supporters’ fears about “terrorist attacks, violent immigrants who enter the country illegally and the decreasing influence of Christianity.”
I get it, obviously — a thorough exploration of politics in the Rust Belt doesn’t “belong” in a rollicking, funny heist movie. Hollywood is a business, and when it comes to money, pleasing as many different self-identifiers as possible is a winning strategy. Though, doesn’t it also say something about the privilege of a white man like Soderbergh, removed from the political battleground of West Virginia by three thousand miles, able to make a movie completely divorced from the reality of racism and conservative politics? Soderbergh can almost be excused from the sidestep, as production for the film began in August 2016. That summer was a contentious one with Trump, but I get it — a lot of gears had been put into place long before Trump ever rose to be a serious presidential candidate. At the same time, if the film purports to take place in the late 2010’s, the state’s shift towards the Republican party would have been hard to miss, a process two decades in the making. I have to wonder: what would the film have looked like if it were made by a black man? A queer woman? A trans person? By someone deeply and unflinchingly aware of the societal atmosphere coalescing around them?
Even beyond those hypotheticals, there’s a lot about the movie’s messaging to side-eye. I take issue with the movie’s tagline: “See how the other half steals,” a glibly curt line that instantly casts working class people as the “other” and a more well-monied audience as “normal.” At a time where income inequality in America is at its worst in a century, “the bourgeoisie” is being treated here to a zoo-like exhibition of “the proletariat.” Compounded on this is media’s tendency to portray white, working class citizens in the midsection of the country as “real” Americans (note the sarcastic use of those quotes). “The other half,” despite their somewhat outsider status, is a return to true values. The Logan family gets away with the heist pretty much on account of being some truly good-hearted, family-oriented people at the end of the day. They are noble thieves, they’re hard-working, and heck, they’re even smart, a “radical” decision to write people with funny accents into clever, Batman-Gambit-esque thinkers, as if accents were a marker of intelligence.
And then — all of us other Americans who are working class and not white, or maybe not working class at all — what does it really mean when “real” does not apply to us? Whose economic anxieties were white liberals wringing their hands over when Clinton lost the election? When POC steal, when we headline our own heist movies in a white America, will we be painted with the same level of charm and whole-heartedness that the Logan family received?
See, this is the issue — every movie has a point of view, even when it claims not to. Take Nocturama, a drama-thriller about a diverse group of twenty-something’s who carry out a terrorist plot in France. It is simultaneously the most millennial movie I’ve ever seen, while clearly coming from an older person saying, tongue-in-cheek, “Them millennials, am I right?” The reasons behind the terrorist plot aren’t at all clear — the movie makes allusions to anger towards capitalism, even going so far as to enacting the murder of some higher-up at HSBC, but other than that, it’s purposefully vague. The plans go awry due to several juvenile and wrong-headed decisions by a rather immature group of young people who seem very ill-equipped to carry out the plot they’ve concocted. And that’s the point. All of them (I’m serious now with the spoiler warning) end up getting picked off, one by one, by the French equivalent of a SWAT team, and I’m left with a hollow feeling in my stomach, asking, “all this, and what for?”
I’m still on the fence as to whether the lack of an ideology behind the film is a strength or a weakness. On the one hand, I’m pretty sure that the hollow feeling I experienced is exactly the kind of reaction director Bertrand Bonello was aiming for, possibly criticizing (though, again, vaguely) the state’s brutality in killing these young people in cold blood. On the other hand, though I don’t pretend to be an expert on what young French people are concerned about nowadays, doesn’t that trivialize the real injustices that millennials are currently fighting against? Nocturama seems to imply this is just a group of disgruntled teens who want to see something burn, without taking on the real responsibility of examining the effect oppressive structures in Western society might have on its young population. It comes up shallow, and frankly, insulting.
Don’t get me wrong, I did thoroughly enjoy both Nocturama and Logan Lucky. It’s not the apolitical nature of both films that I have a problem with — it’s that they are both politics-adjacent, but hesitate to make full, confident strides into the territory they’re toeing the line of, and in doing so, are borderline irresponsible with their messaging. Logan Lucky touches briefly on current political issues — Channing Tatum’s Jimmy gets laid off in the beginning of the movie from his construction job, a nod to shrinking blue-collar industries, as well as a sweet and almost utopian moment of white and black prison inmates working together to advance the plan of the white male protagonist. Post-Charlottesville, I’d almost call that a fantasy. Nocturama, in particular, has a coyness about its politics that I don’t exactly appreciate. If you’re going to make a film about terrorists, some of whom are brown and implied to be Muslim, shouldn’t the intent behind that choice be a little sharper?
Both could have been stronger films — yes, even aesthetically, even operating on a story level — if they had truly buckled down in their ideology. There is a powerful history of truly amazing, groundbreaking cinema that weren’t afraid to have a political point of view. We don’t have to look far back for Punishment Park or any of Godard’s criticisms on Algerian colonialism. New Hollywood was so revered because of the way its auteurs railed against institutions— of the movie business, yes, but also sexism and racism. Almost every movie from the 70’s was daring, clearly ideological, speaking out against social ills. Cinema as the voice of the people, as a visceral reminder of our collective sins, is where its power as a form of storytelling comes from. Would Punishment Park have been as good of a movie if it depicted a fictional military state, instead of doubling down on the real fascism present in the Nixon era? Would we have Weekend in its truest, rawest form if Godard wasn’t also airing his hatred of the war in Algeria?
A lot of people resist pushing ideology, especially that of a sociopolitical nature, into film because, as some say, you don’t want to see all that in movie. “I don’t like politics being shoved down my throat,” is a common complaint. But every movie, like it or not, is a morality tale of some sort. Humans are unable to be truly neutral, and personal experiences, the way each of us moves through life, will always color the way we interpret the art we see. Every story has a message, so why not have agency over it? The Christian fundamentalists have already latched onto this idea, producing a whole slew of films pushing their agenda, from the God’s Not Dead series to whatever the hell Kirk Cameron is producing these days. And yes, they are terrible. They are travesties, a stain upon the history of cinema, their sole purpose to spread lies and truly acrobatic leaps of logic to reinforce their own points. But at least they have a point of view. And I know we “liberal” filmmakers can do much better than this.
An apolitical film in 2017 suffers from the privilege of being able to ignore politics in a world that is increasingly unable to. I want more Weekends, more Punishment Parks, for cinema to be brave about the message it wants to send. I want a Nocturama where the anger of its young protagonists is not a distilled, generalized millennial malaise, but a focused kind of rage — and for the movie to deliver a point of view on it, whether I agree with it or not. If it’s a criticism on the damages capitalism has wreaked on our society, then let it be clear, let it be striking, and let it be divisive, because that is happening for real, to real people, all over the world. I want a world where a movie like Logan Lucky can take an introspective look on what it means to be a white working class person in West Virginia without being deemed “alienating” by crowdsourced marketing strategies, while also being a fun heist movie. I have faith in the unlimited capacity of human imagination; we can have both in the same two-hour film.
Art, after all, is always political — it is always a product of its place and time. To think that cinema can be extricated from history, viewed in bliss without sociopolitical context, is naive. To use cinema for positive social change — well, that wouldn’t be new, but given our current place in history, I’d say it’s absolutely necessary.
If you, as a reader, are still asking why I, a queer woman of color, must make everything “political,” it is because there hasn’t been a day in my life where I’ve had the luxury of ignoring my race, gender, sexuality, etc. My very existence is political; any POC can tell you that to “not think about politics” belies a privilege of never having had to think about them to begin with. Being who I am, I have no choice but to be thoughtful about my place in the world. I hold the media I consume, therefore, to the very same standard.
Isn’t it about time we all did?

