What Art is "Political"?
I bet you think Robocop is “political”
This was the claim of Malaysian political commentator Ian Miles Cheong (in what appears to be a now-deleted 2019 tweet), stated amidst a longer series of tweets about the contemporary media landscape.
Is his implication correct, that Robocop is not a “political” film? Well, what exactly is a “political” film? Does “political” mean propaganda, as in Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will? Does “political” mean commentary on modern politics, as in Fahrenheit 9/11 or VICE or What Is a Woman? or The Apprentice? Does “political” mean highlighting specific philosophical ideals, as in God’s Not Dead or The God Delusion? Or does it simply mean, as I would argue, a work of art that is about something.
Is a film about a near future America where the economy is teetering on the razor’s edge of economic and social collapse such that the city of Detroit sells control of its police force to a massive technology company—a massive tech company that it turns out is actually funneling money, guns, and drugs into local gangs and neighborhoods in order to manufacture a demand for their new, robot police officers, political? Is such a film saying anything? Does such a film have a point of view?
When asked to clarify his stance on what Cheong himself thought Robocop was about, he said:
Big metal cop shoots bad guys in dystopian future setting. Like everyone else who isn't spending a lot of time reading into its themes.
And there’s the cat, out of the bag.
You see, this is where I think a lot of this disconnect between perceptions of what makes a work of art political or apolitical lies: in the implicity or explicity of the work’s themes, or perhaps—through a less sympathetic lens—whether or not you, the viewer, are paying attention to the work of art in question. For a work to be “political” does not mean the work has to be about contemporary politics or about a specific political philosophy or any particular Left or Right ideology; it only means that the work of art is about something. It has themes. It has subtext. It was created with intentionality by its creator. But today it seems like whether or not a work is labeled as political or apolitical is entirely up to how the viewer/reader/listener engages with the work (if they engage with it at all).
In the example of Cheong’s reading of Robocop, it’s clear that he’s aware the movie has subtext. He’s aware that there are themes at play within the storytelling; but he just doesn’t care to engage with them. Thus, in his mind, the work becomes apolitical, simply by his ignoring of the authorial intent of director Paul Verhoeven and writers Ed Neumeier and Michael Miner and all the aesthetic signposts to those intentions that the movie is throwing up in front of his eyes. To say Robocop is apolitical is, to my mind, akin to saying something like Fahrenheit 451 is apolitical, because it is simply a story about a fireman who starts fires instead of putting them out. Okay, what kind of fires is he starting? Oh, he’s burning books? Hmm. Most of us, upon learning this plot point, would sit up a little straighter and say, “No, that’s clearly not apolitical.” We would look at this novel from the 1950s, written when the imagery of Nazi book-burning rallies would still have been very clear in people’s minds, and be able to say, “Okay, maybe this Ray Bradbury guy is trying to say something.” And yet, there seem to be plenty of people like Cheong who just… apparently wouldn’t ever arrive at that point. When the politics are abstracted, as they often are in fiction, and the lens through which we’re viewing the world of the narrative is that of, say, a cyborg police officer, it is seemingly all too easy for the subtext to slip past the eyes and ears of the viewer.
It’s why movies like A Bug’s Life aren’t constantly referenced as grand works of Communist fiction. Despite being, quite literally, a film about ant workers (proletariat) seizing the means of production from a powerful, upper class of grasshopper (bourgeoisie), defying a villain who says things like—in reference to why their clan of grasshoppers will not abide even a single ant standing up to them—“Those puny, little ants outnumber us a hundred to one; and if they ever figure that out, there goes our way of life. It’s not about food. It’s about keeping those ants in line,” slips under the analytical radar of most folks because it is… an animated movie about ants recruiting a troupe of bug circus performers to help them scare aware the grasshoppers that keep stealing their food. Is A Bug’s Life “political”? Do the ants have nothing to lose but their chains?
Many words have been spilt over the past decades about “media literacy”, especially in this second decade of the 21st century, given how it seems like people just… can’t interpret fiction anymore? Everything is death of the author. A work is political because I say it is, and it is apolitical because I say it is. So what that Paul Verhoeven said that the character of Robocop was “like the American Jesus”, with Murphy’s execution photographed like a crucifixion and his penultimate confrontation with the villains evoking the image of Christ walking on water? Or that Verhoeven gave the antagonist tiny little glasses so that he “looked a bit like Heinrich Himmler”? HELLO. IS THIS THING ON?
These days I feel a little bit like I’m going insane. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent nearly my whole life being obsessed with storytelling, so I’ve just spent a lot of time in that world, but it really seems like there are a lot of people out there just willfully not engaging with the fiction they watch/read/listen to. It’s like in the anecdote about a teacher working through some classical work of fiction with their class, who draws attention to the blue curtains in a given scene and asks the students, “What do the blue curtains mean?” These people want to be the author of the fictional work, coming into the class and saying with authority, “It means the curtains were blue.”
They see fiction as escapism, plain and simple, and so if a work of fiction dares to invite in a discussion of something from the real world that makes them uncomfortable, it must be because of some sort of deliberate “political” impetus, because of some urge by the author to show you something, to preach at you, and convince you of their way of thinking; and not that the work of art is something made by human beings with unique experiences and perspectives that will inevitably inform how they create their art.
And yet, it may in some cases be true that a work of art is made with the sole intent of trying to convince the viewer to the creator’s way of thinking; but is that… wrong? Science-fiction author and essayist Judith Merrill, in an essay titled “What Do You Mean—Science? Fiction?” divided sci-fi up into three categories: Preaching Stories, Teaching Stories, and Speculative Fiction. From her perspective, “Preaching Stories” were things like Nineteen Eighty-four and Brave New World, stories she said were “primarily allegories and satires - morality pieces, prophecies, visions, and warnings,” stories that certainly had a definite goal in mind in terms of how the story was to affect the mind and philosophy of the reader. But surely we would not say that simply because these stories were “political” that this means they are bad, unlike what seems to be the prevailing attitude of the current day. “Political” has become a pejorative label, oftentimes seemingly used interchangeably with words like “Woke” (typically alongside the maxim of Go Woke, Go Broke). In fact, I’d argue that Nineteen Eighty-four at the very least implicitly advocates for sexual liberation as a means of defying authoritarian regimes. Does this mean Orwell was Woke? If it does, does that mean Nineteen Eighty-four should be ignored or cast aside because of its up-front, explicitly “political” intentions? Of course not. You may not enjoy stories that are so in-your-face about their purpose for existing, but that does not mean they are bad by default.
I think that the use of the term “political” to derogatorily describe certain works of art betrays a deeper current of anti-intellectualism that has wound its way into broader culture. I’m sure there are others, smarter than me, who’ve come to this same conclusion; but it seems like as public distrust of “experts” in the fields of history, medicine, academia, etc. has grown, so too has distrust of people like art critics—even hobbyist ones like myself who’re simply looking at the imagery of a given work and saying, “I don’t know, guys, it really seems like there’s a point to how these images are strung together,” not even to speak of how, in the era of the internet, professional critics are perceived by laypeople (see: how often the discrepancy between “Audience” and “Critics” scores on sites like Rotten Tomatoes are used to proclaim that Critics are “wrong” about popular movies, i.e. the Critics are “wrong” about The Last Jedi because the Audience score is so much lower and since there are way more Audience than there are Critics, clearly the Audience is “right”—mob rule over the interpretation of art). The person who has become a vaccine skeptic because of several hours of online research will, with the same ease that they denounce the decades of training of a medical professional, claim that Robocop is simply an apolitical masterwork of action cinema, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
This is not to say, of course, that critics are always right about a given work of art. I’ll discuss Verhoeven again, because famously critics hated his silver-screen interpretation of Starship Troopers when it first came out, some even going so far as to say it preserves the “fascist utopianism of the original Heinlein novel.” But is that true? Let’s examine this scene from the film:
Johnny Rico and his friends are going to the local recruiting office to put in their enlistment forms for military service. Rico is going to join the Mobile Infantry. When the recruit officer is stamping their forms he says, “Fresh meat for the grinder, eh?” It’s playful, and the characters laugh politely. But then, as the recruitment officer is looking over Rico’s form, for the Mobile Infantry, the officer takes Rico’s hand, shakes it, and says, “Good for you. The Mobile Infantry made me the man I am today.”
From that description, you may think, “Okay, that doesn’t really sound like it’s anti or pro-war; just a normal recruitment scene you’d see in any sort of military film.” Well, some other things to note here that are shown visually. Firstly, the hand with which the officer shakes Rico’s is mechanical. Clearly, he lost his arm in the war. Okay, also not wildly pro or against war, conceptually. Could just be visual character development. Lots of veterans have prosthetics. But then, as the officer goes to file Rico’s form, he backs away from his desk, and we see that the officer also has no legs. And the enthusiasm on Rico’s face vanishes, at least for now. We can imagine the officer’s words repeating in Rico’s ears, The Mobile Infantry made me the man I am today. Will Rico return from the war with no arms and no legs? Will he return from the war at all?
Surely, even just considering this one scene, we could all agree that it is clear that Verhoeven is not making a pro-military film; not even to speak of the many other instances in the film where Verhoeven (who, I should mention, is a Dutch filmmaker born in Amsterdam in 1938 who grew up under Nazi occupation) clearly shows the government of this future version of Earth in the unkindest light possible. The recruitment officer’s claim of “meat grinder” is correct. The worth of the young soldiers sent off to fight in this meaningless war is only in their bodies, as a bulwark against the enemy. And when they end up inevitably skewered on the business end of a bug claw, they become, quite literally, simply meat.
This is the kind of stuff I’m talking about when I say that it seems like people just aren’t paying attention to fiction anymore. And in some cases this kind of critical apathy is being deliberately cultivated by distributors like Netflix, who reportedly see many of their shows as being “second screen”, i.e. something you’d have on while your primary focus is your phone or tablet. And now that Netflix runs ads on their lower tier of subscriptions, it behooves them for you to keep their app on for as long as possible. If, suddenly, a viewer might find a show is challenging them to keep up with its storytelling, they might simply turn it off, perhaps to return to it later, or perhaps to pivot to some other, more comfortable show. So why not try to make “content” (a word that, as a colloquial replacement for “art”, sends shivers down my spine) that is easy and unchallenging for viewers to consume? Well, as Solaris author Stanislaw Lem said, “Where anything comes easy, nothing can be of value” (“Cosmology and Science Fiction”, 1977). I think art should be challenging, or at the very least make you think, about something. Anything! Come on, people, what are we even doing here???
Secondarily, though closely related, because “Art” is as much a business in the 20th and 21st centuries as it is art (i.e. creative self-expression) there is a financial incentive for creators to not make their works so obviously “political”. In these days of increasing political polarization, it is a risky business proposition to publicly proclaim your work of fiction to be “political”, if only for the simple implication that you might be removing 50% of your potential customer base right then and there if your story falls on the “wrong” side of the political divide.
We saw this recently in a Facebook post from Terrifier (a horror/slasher about a killer clown named Art) writer/director Damien Leone. I’m not on Facebook, so I don’t know what specifically prompted Damien to make the original post, but I saw it reposted to his Twitter account. Essentially he seemed to be assuaging fans of his films that—never fear!—the Terrifier movies are not “political”. Here’s the most relevant passage:
Terrifier is not in any way, shape, or form a political franchise. I did not get into filmmaking to become a politician or promote any political agendas or ideologies, especially through a killer clown movie. I fell in love with horror movies as a form of pure entertainment and those are the films I like to make.
Now, if you’ll allow me to partake of, perhaps hypocritically, some death of the author-ing of my own, I think that Leone has not actually given enough thought to his own films.
How could the killer clown movie be “political”? Well, firstly, simply by being a killer clown movie. The idea of a killer clown is scary (re: ideal as a horror mascot) because it inverts the core idea of a clown, being that of an innocent, playful, charming jester (often associated with their proximity to children) and turns it into a malevolent, violent creature. Is this inversion not saying something? Was Halloween not frightening because of its implication that horror is not merely something that happens out in the abandoned cabin in the woods (The Evil Dead), or out in rural America (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), or on the open ocean (Jaws); but because it could happen in your safe, well-lit, middle-class American neighborhood? Is Terrifier’s inversion of innocence not unconsciously more frightening than any of its kills?
@jbromovies, a popular film critic on Twitter, said it well in a response to Damien Leone’s post:
The Damien Leone stuff is so funny because why would I bother checking out your work if you look me in my eyes and say “I have nothing to say at all”
And that is where I think my views on the political vs. apolitical discourse really distill down to their purest form. If political art is that which is trying to say something, then apolitical art must be that which is trying to say nothing.
It’s the same reason I think that we should refuse to call images made by generative AI “art”. Art made by humans is intentional and purposeful. “Art” made by a computer is not. And so it is my belief that art made without the intent to say anything is just as useless. Your art should say something about what you believe, even if it’s subtle. I think it’s perverse to think that anyone could ever actually make something that doesn’t say anything about their creator’s beliefs. I don’t think I could do that if I tried! We need to do away with the idea that “political” art is simply that which we do not agree with, and thus that it is “bad” by default; because, as I hope I’ve laid out here, all art is political. It can’t help it. It is not the responsibility of the artist to create something that coddles you, or conforms to your exact philosophical framework of the world, despite the fact that it seems like there are a great many laypeople out there who would love nothing more than for the media landscape to be just that.
So my plea to you is this: seek out “challenging” art. Be thoughtful. Consider the subtext and themes of what you’re watching, reading, and listening to; and I think you’ll discover that your world of entertainment will become far richer because of it.