A bit of cultural theory (and history)
In the preceding post (5 July 2023), I spelled out my ideas about a Rant as a work of political invective that blends features of satire, science fiction, and monster tale. Taking the form of a longer narrative (whether textual or audiovisual), these works, which I also call Speculative Satire, voice not just an emphatic challenge to the social status quo, but issue a grim warning about that status quo.
The alarm being sounded is this: the status quo is, in fact, a threatening false orthodoxy leading us headlong into catastrophe.
I name that false orthodoxy the Regime. By that term I mean specifically the neoliberal economic and neoconservative political policies ushered into power with the 1980 presidential election of Ronald Reagan.
Although the Democratic Party is by no means innocent of blame, the Republican administrations of Reagan (1981-1989), Bush 1 (1989-1993), and Bush 2 (2001-2009) aggressively implemented these ideologies with devastating cumulative effect worldwide. For example, the astronomical gap between a super-wealthy, politically empowered elite minority and the rest of the global population has never been wider. In its World Inequity Report 2022, the World Inequality Database (see here) states:
The richest 10% of the global population currently takes 52% of global income, whereas the poorest half of the population earns 8.5% of it. ... Global wealth inequalities are even more pronounced than income inequalities. The poorest half of the global population barely owns any wealth at all, possessing just 2% of the total. In contrast, the richest 10% of the global population own 76% of all wealth. (10)
Yeah, if you’re unfamiliar with inequity statistics such as these, you can pick your jaw up off the floor now. The whole point of neoliberal economic policies is to siphon money—as quickly and as much as possible—from the middle and working classes up to the plutocrats.
On the front of international politics, arguably Bush 2’s disastrous Iraq War (2002-2011) not only threw into abject chaos an already unstable part of the (oil-rich) world, but sparked the continuing refugee crisis in Europe (see, among many examples, here and here and here). Add to these millions of impoverished, displaced people millions more globally who are displaced by poverty, political violence, and the worsening climate crisis (fueled—literally—by the big oil companies), and one can see why immigrants are streaming north to find a home in wealthier nations.
In turn, this forced migration from the struggling global south toward the wealthier global north has sparked in both Europe and America the rise of authoritarian “strong men.” That tribe of political leaders make promises to their reality-challenged followers that this tide of “cultural invaders” must and will be stopped—thus preserving both a national and a racial “purity.”
Ugh. You know the bigoted drumbeat of these dangerous dime-store despots.
Then, to put a cherry on top of this great big neoliberal-neoconservative shit pie, Putin spawned the election of The Donald in 2016. Trump’s in equal parts ludicrous and destructive presidential stint (2017-2021), along with his creation of the still-lethal MAGA movement, have both elevated and morphed the already-appalling false orthodoxy of the Regime to previously unimaginable heights of bald-faced avarice and absurdity.
And here is where we wallow and teeter, perilously, today.
All of this—and more—is what Rants have been battling since the 1980s.
Applying this bit of cultural theory (and history)
Two famous 20th-century prototypes of the Rant are Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949). They combine the same satire/sci-fi/monster mix as our current-day speculative satire but, obviously, target Regimes earlier than ours.
In his ruthlessly bleak novel, Orwell imagines the threatening false orthodoxy of Stalinist dictatorships taking over the world. While his brilliant and scathing creations of “Big Brother” and “doublethink” still impact and are relevant to our political discourse today, it’s likewise safe to say that Orwell got it somewhat wrong in the monstrous status quo he imagines and attacks. The future political threat to humanity has turned out not to be communism, as Orwell feared, but Fordian corporate capitalism, as Huxley correctly anticipated and mercilessly satirizes in his novel. Huxley also uses a lighter, wry tone in his no-less blistering denunciation of mindless consumerism and industrial-strength social engineering.
When Reagan and the 1980s came along, writers and filmmakers started to react to his new brand of rightwing conservatism by echoing the works of Huxley and Orwell. While, of course, all Rants are not modeled directly on the social-political satire of those two authors, still, echoes of 1984 and Brave New World are difficult to avoid in speculative satire.
Here’s a quick list of works I’ve either written about as Rants or consider to fall into this category of post-1980 political satire. This list is by no means exhaustive, but it gives you an idea of the variety and the scale of the genre I theorize. I maintain that, in each one, some manner of three-part blending takes place where monstrosity (whether human or non-human) and a sci-fi scenario (of some sort) combine to bring to mind a satiric reassessment of the viewer’s or reader’s social moment.
Some early Rants coming in the final decades of the 20th century include the iconic film Blade Runner (1982) by Ridley Scott, Terry Gilliam’s zany but prophetic film Brazil (1985), and Margaret Atwood’s now-famous novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). (I’ll note here that I first read Atwood’s novel the year it was published and, although I found the overall storyline decidedly intriguing, the premise of a radical rightwing group storming into the Capitol Building to slaughter all the lawmakers inside struck me as a tad far-fetched. Oh, young and naïve me.) More examples of nascent speculative satire are Tim Burton’s very wacky and wicked Mars Attacks! (1996) as well as, maybe, Paul Verhoeven’s off-kilter movie Starship Troopers (1997)—which mostly tracks as libertarian Robert Heinlein fare but, every now and then, flashes so campy as to make you wonder if the whole thing isn’t, in fact, a rightwing sendup.
With the turn of the century, Rants kick into high gear both in frequency and intensity. Margaret Atwood resumes her grim extrapolations with The MaddAddam Trilogy (2003-2013). With V for Vendetta (2006), James McTeigue lodges a full-throated invective against the neoconservative and criminal regime of Bush 2 and Dick Cheney. Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic narrative The Road (2006) makes you want to dig and stock your underground shelter immediately. (I could not read that book at night—only in daylight.) Even James Cameron’s 2009 mega-hit, Avatar, can be seen as a pointed attack on the destructive conjunction of corporate neoliberal and militaristic neoconservative forces.
The deeper we get into the 21st century, the harder the Rants push our panic buttons. Many episodes from the series Black Mirror (2011-2023) send chills down your spine. Two of my favorites are from Season 3 (2016), “Nosedive” (E1) and “Men Against Fire” (E5). For a nice satiric dig at the super-wealthy—that unfortunately did not turn into a very good film—see Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium (2013). For a really fine Menippean satire against Big Tech—that’s not super-satisfying as a novel and was made into a miserable film—read The Circle (2013) by Dave Eggers. On the other end of the quality scale, as a Marxist denuding par excellence of capitalistic social structure, Joon-ho Bong’s film Snowpiercer (2013) is hard to beat.
Inevitably, Artificial Intelligence starts to come to the fore as the preeminent monster of the new millennium. Or is the real monster the tech companies racing for profit to create A.I. before we have any very good idea of what it might do to us? Or is the real monster we billions of stupid users who get sucked into the data-mining frenzy of social media? Or is the real monster the uncanny allure of artificial beings? Asking such questions is the quietly powerful film Her (2013) by Spike Jonze, the brain-teasing Ex Machina (2014) by Alex Garland, the big-splash-then-fizzled-out HBO series Westworld (2016-2022) by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, and the Replicant-redux of Blade Runner 2049 (2017) by Denis Villeneuve.
Given that an A.I. chatbot such as ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) has just burst onto the scene—boding much trouble for the future of the human-written word—and that members of Congress are now holding hearings to try to get their heads around an avalanche of tech innovations—good luck with that one—no doubt we face lots of A.I. shenanigans coming our way.
Back to speculative satire in general, in my estimation, Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) is both a perfect movie and a perfect Rant. By invading the genre of horror, Peele satirically obliterates the false orthodoxy of white supremacy. He shrewdly manipulates body-snatching in the sci-fi vein of Frankenstein-like monstrosity to expose the insane paradox of simultaneous white-hatred and white-envy toward African Americans. While Peele’s Us (2019) is not a perfect film, it’s a wholly worthwhile condemnation of haves and have-nots in America. As another social thriller, Nope (2022) blends the key elements of speculative satire, but Peele’s narrower target seems to be the entertainment industry itself.
Deserving praise as well is the Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale (2017-present) created by Bruce Miller. Not only does its first season faithfully render Atwood’s original novel, but its subsequent seasons have commendably elaborated upon the dystopian mayhem imagined by Atwood. The story of Offred-cum-June maintains its punch as it heads into a sixth season. Certainly, the many outrages of the Trump administration fueled a keen viewer appetite for June’s feminist mutiny. Still, it is no mean storytelling feat to extend in a compelling way such a forceful and influential narrative as Atwood’s.
Certainly, not all of the works named above make use of the triple ingredients of satire, sci-fi, and monster in equal portions or in the same way. Some texts accentuate particular qualities of the Rant over others. In a few of them, the satire might be understated or merely implied, and so a bit hard to discern. In many, there are no weird creatures per se fulfilling the role of monster, but just monsters of the human variety, usually driven by greed and prejudice.
However, regardless of the combination of characteristics any individual Rant marshals in its attack against the Regime, the overall aim of the work is the same: to stimulate in the reader first perplexity, then critical thinking, then re-examination of the here and now—an edified reassessment of one’s social order that can range anywhere from uncomfortable to unnerving to downright distressing.
To conclude this quick survey of post-1980 speculative satire, let’s take a quick look at how the aims of the genre are accomplished in Adam McKay’s recent Netflix original movie, Don’t Look Up (2021; see here).
Don’t Look Up uses a possible natural disaster—a large comet hitting the Earth—as a telling metaphor for an actual human-made disaster—climate change. This movie, then, invades the popular genre of the comet or asteroid disaster film (see here) where a big chunk of something is hurtling toward us and we try to do something about it. Typically in these movies, humanity either heroically rallies to avert the disaster (e.g. Armageddon) or tragically makes sobering preparations to take the big hit (e.g. Deep Impact).
In Don’t Look Up, however, humanity does neither. And therein lies the painful derision and bitter warning of speculative satire.
The false orthodoxy under attack in McKay’s film is more or less everything about America right now—to include us sitting on the couch watching Netflix. As a society, we are shown as being too power-mongering, too profit-mongering, and too pleasure-mongering to be able to remove our self-involved heads from our self-satisfied butts—even when we can see the locomotive of a comet-cum-climate-catastrophe heading straight for us. This accurate and merciless depiction of our current-day status quo makes Don’t Look Up hard to watch. It’s also what makes people complain that, as a “comedy,” McKay’s film fails because it isn’t funny (see, for example, here).
Of course Don’t Look Up isn’t funny. It’s not comedy. It’s satire. And first-rate satire hurts. First-rate satire forces you into rethinking how you’re living your life.
While the role of the monster in Don’t Look Up might seem, at first, to be the comet coming at us, in fact the many monsters of the movie are all of the human variety—specifically, people sold on the specious ideologies of American popular discourse. President Orlean (Meryl Streep) and her idiot son, Jason (Jonah Hill), stand in for the imbecility of Trump and his Me-First administration. Like Trump, Orlean pumps out monstrous lie after monstrous lie to stay in political power, and her injudicious supporters swallow them whole.
For example, one of many painfully delicious moments in the film is when, at a big rally, an Orlean supporter, wearing a red “Don’t Look Up” hat, sneaks a quick look up over his shoulder to see, in fact, the comet he’s been told, repeatedly, isn’t there. The guy shouts, “What? What the hell is that!? Fucking lied to us!”
And all of us of a non-MAGA persuasion can only slap our foreheads...
A monstrosity of neoliberalism is Mark Rylance (Peter Isherwell), an air-headed, Zuckerberg-like tech tycoon posing as a Zen man-of-the-masses. In fact, he’s only laser-focused on raking in data and revenue—and eventually saving his own ass by building a rocket ship to transport himself and a gaggle of his fellow 1%-ers off the planet before the comet hits. Like Zuckerberg, Rylance pumps out flimflam after flimflam to maintain a cybernetic monopoly—and his gullible followers “like” them avidly.
Popular entertainment is lambasted as well in the film. The mirth-ridden anchors of “The Daily Rip,” Brie Evantee (Cate Blanchett) and Jack Bremmer (Tyler Perry), personify the pablum-based “news” coverage of the major media outlets. Maybe the most cringe-inducing mockery of all, though, is the cheesy ballad “Just Look Up” sung by pop-music superstars and power couple Riley Bina (Ariana Grande) and DJ Chello (Kid Cudi). Even when trying to do the right thing, our popular culture seems only capable of producing soppy spectacle that, somehow, manages to divert our real attention from the crisis at hand.
And let’s not forget the driving monstrosity of our present culture: social media. Throughout Don’t Look Up, the public is far more concerned with what and how things are trending rather than the reality that in six months everyone is going to die.
If McKay’s film were just a spoof on comet disaster movies, it would be both funny and perceptive. But it’s much more than a clever parody. Don’t Look Up is a Menippean wake-up call for the rapidly approaching global cataclysm of climate change. The way in which the astronomy graduate student, Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), and her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), are ignored in the film excruciatingly reflects how the warnings of climate scientists have been ridiculed and ignored for decades. The symbol of an inevitable and onrushing planet-killing comet calls to mind exactly what’s coming at us—wait a minute...what’s already here—as the earth warms.
In comet movies, the natural disaster heading our way is not of our own making. It’s a piece of really bad cosmic luck that we just have to deal with. With climate change, however, we’re bringing the disaster down on our own heads. What’s worse, we’re too busy with our pursuit of power and profit and pleasure even to acknowledge—let alone do anything about—the shit that’s already hitting the fan.
Thus, we’re faced with the unbearable message of McKay’s satire: not only are we the authors of our own doom, but we’re blithely sauntering into its waiting jaws.
No. None of this is funny. Nor is it intended to be. The real point of the movie is if a critical mass of us is ready to wake up, rethink things, and do something about it.
Or do we want to keep our heads down banning books, prohibiting reproductive health care, suppressing voter rights, peddling automatic weapons, and foaming at the mouth about drag shows?
So what?
The upshot of all this should be quite obvious.
Speculative satire does not indulge in escapism; instead, Rants encourage our escape from bullshitocracy.
Rather than belabor this point, I’ll make two recommendations.
To help see past the neoliberal economic bullshit of the Regime, subscribe to the Robert Reich Substack newsletter by, needless to say, Robert Reich (see here). A great example would be his post, “The Larger Meaning of the Hollywood Strike” (18 July 2023).
To help see past the neoconservative-cum-MAGA political bullshit of the Regime, subscribe to the Letters from an American Substack newsletter by Heather Cox Richardson (see here). A great example would be her post, “July 17, 2023” (I’ll let you take one guess at the date of this post).
Both of these pieces pertain exactly and clarify perfectly the kind of economic inequality and the mounting political authoritarianism that have dominated American ideology since affable old Ronnie Reagan stepped into the Oval Office.