Anti-capitalist films can end up affirming capital’s own fantasies

Evidence

Wall-E’s attack on consumerism is easily absorbed. The “insult” that provoked Kyle Smith into disgust was its image of humans as obese, infantilised chair-bound consumers supping pap from cups. Initially, it might seem subversive and ironic that a film made by a massive corporation should have such an anti-consumerist and anti-corporate message (it is made clear in the film that the mega corporation Buy N Large is chiefly responsible for the environmental depredation which has destroyed earth as a human environment). Yet it is capital which is the great ironist, easily able to metabolise anti-corporate rhetoric by selling it back to an audience as entertainment. Besides, on the level of content, Wall-E ends up serving capitalist realism, presenting what we might think of as the very fantasies of capital itself — that it can continue to expand infinitely; that the despoilation of the human environment on Earth is a temporary problem that will eventually be overcome; that human labour can be extirpated altogether (on the spaceship Axiom, humans are given over entirely to consumption, and all work is performed by servomechanisms). Human labour returns only at the end of the film, when capital/Axiom begins its terraforming of Earth. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 583

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Anti-capitalist messages on screen can end up reinforcing capitalist realism — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2223; Corporate anti-capitalist satire reinforces rather than undermines capitalist realism — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 29; Capitalism’s ideology is now itself anti-capitalist in content — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 582 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Anti-capitalist messages on screen can end up reinforcing capitalist realism #expands (0.95) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2223
• Corporate anti-capitalist satire reinforces rather than undermines capitalist realism #exemplifies (0.90) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 29
• A work faithfully depicting capitalist realism may thereby reinforce it #expands (0.90) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2223
• Capitalism’s ideology is now itself anti-capitalist in content #expands (0.85) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 582
• Even critically aware individual-focused films still serve ideology #expands (0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 111
• Capital absorbed the left’s own liberation desires against it #expands (0.80) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 74
• Commercial tax motivations can subsidize radical avant-garde film #qualifies (0.75) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 36