Jungle’s realism naturalises winner-take-all reality along with defensive anti-capitalism

Evidence

I’m not saying that there are no political potentials at all in the popular culture I discuss in Capitalist Realism. What I was pointing to, though, was the fact that anti-capitalism at the level of a film’s message does nothing in itself to disrupt the super-hegemony of capital. Anti-capitalism — or at least anti-corporatism — is utterly standard within Hollywood films: consider something like Avatar, for instance. This is the objective irony of capital: nothing sells better than anti-capitalism. Or, even more bleakly, late capitalism’s culture is anti-capitalist. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2223 (#expands, via linked claim)

If humanism is the great sine qua non of Western political and cultural life—larger than a discourse, experienced as more intrinsic than mere ideology—then realism, as the dominant aesthetic growing within the humanist world, must be understood as a particular kind of historically traceable construct with an ambivalent relationship to power. Realism has been the vehicle for some of the most stringent novelistic criticisms of the status quo while at the same time reproducing assumptions about normality and humanity that work to pathologize those who exist outside its orbit. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 438 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Realism masks ideology as maturation via biology and economic constraint — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 996; Capitalist realism’s debunking pose masks its own myth of choice — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2454; Anti-capitalist messages on screen can end up reinforcing capitalist realism — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2223 (+6 more)

Related

• Genres like Jungle sustain an anti-capitalist politics that is explicitly non-socialist (similarity 0.89)
• Capitalist realism’s debunking pose masks its own myth of choice (similarity 0.83)
• Anti-capitalist messages on screen can end up reinforcing capitalist realism (similarity 0.81)
• Realism masks ideology as maturation via biology and economic constraint (similarity 0.80)
• Gangster culture’s brutal authenticity becomes marketable realism that legitimates capitalism (similarity 0.80)
• Capitalist realism reflects social decomposition, not just individual persuasion. (similarity 0.80)
• Capitalist realism is the belief that capitalism is the only viable game in town (similarity 0.79)
• Jungle carried an anti-capitalist politics that never met a matching political movement (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Anti-capitalist messages on screen can end up reinforcing capitalist realism #expands (0.85) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2223
• Realism both critiques and reinforces the status quo’s exclusions #exemplifies (0.75) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 438
• Systemic realism and active political commitment can coexist rather than exclude each other #complicates (0.75)
• Capitalist realism’s debunking pose masks its own myth of choice #expands (0.72) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2454