Panem et Circenses: On Anti-Capitalist Mass Spectacle Sunny Jeong-Eimer, Pomona ’25 Staff Writer Give the people panem et circenses, “bread and circuses,” and they will sacrifice their political freedom for the delight of spectacular entertainment. This phrase, first coined by Roman poet Juvenal in A.D. 100 to describe how Roman politicians deployed spectacle as a means of public diversion and domination, captures a running theme throughout human history: namely, the inextricable relationship between mass consumption of spectacle and the construction of power. Of course, the Roman circus is now a relic of the ancient past. In contemporary times, the spectacle is artistically rendered for the silver screen, presented as commodities of mass television and cinema with ideological strings attached. The ‘ideological strings’ attached to much of contemporary media in the age of advanced capitalism, then, must constrain the public social imaginary to accept the hegemonic interests of Capital as eternal, absent any alternatives. At the same time, we increasingly see the proliferation of so-called ‘anti-capitalist media’ in the twentyfirst century, calling into question the conflicting potential of mass media as an avenue to both social control and class struggle. Using the works of Gilles Deleuze, Guy Debord, and Mark Fisher, I first evaluate the mass media spectacle as a primary constituent of social reality and tool of capitalist domination. Then, with the support of Toward a Third Cinema by Fernando Solans and Octavio Getino, I consider the possibilities of creating mass media by and for the masses—in other words, how the oppressed might seize the means of production of spectacle to construct alternative futures beyond capitalism. Early twentieth century films existed in the era of what Gilles Deleuze, in his essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control,”1 described
as the disciplinary society—a term first coined by Michel Foucault. This model of control is best represented by the factory: an enclosed brick-and-mortar environment in which individuals are ordered in time and space, gathered into a labor force intended to generate value that exceeds the sum of its labor force parts (i.e., machinery, human laborers). The role of film in the disciplinary society is to generate normative standards of obedience to environments and institutions of enclosure: the factory, but also the nuclear family home, school, prison, and so on. The disciplinary society demands that individuals find themselves enclosed in a social monolith; they are the good American citizen, the hard worker, domestic wife, breadwinning father—these media tropes construct each individual into their prescribed role in the social hierarchy. One’s subjectivity predictably adheres to a metastory of where they fit in the historical moment. Censorship, then, becomes a strategy the film industry employs in order to guard the ideological foundation of this closed hierarchy from potential breaches. As an example, one need only look to the Hollywood blacklist of the mid-20th century, the post-WWII Cold War period, when American disciplinary society was at its height. Organized by the U.S. government’s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC),2 the blacklist sought to end the employment of entertainment industry professionals suspected of being or sympathizing with Communists: Nothing subversive or un-American has appeared on the screen, nor can any number of Hollywood investigations obscure the patriotic services of the 30,000 loyal Americans employed in Hollywood who have given our government invaluable aid to war and peace.
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