Panem et Circenses: On Anti-Capitalist Mass Spectacle, Sunny Jeong-Eimer, Pomona ’25

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.

The Waldorf Statement, read at the first HUAC trial by Motion Picture Association of America president Eric Johnston

Hence, the first half of the twentieth century largely saw the Hollywood screen remain uncontaminated by “subversive or un-American” activities. The blacklist is a testament to the state’s fear that mass entertainment might threaten the project of embedding American nationalist family-work values in the social fabric of society—values, which, at the time, were integral to the developmental motions of neoliberalism. Propaganda lived in the coherence of grand narratives which imposed a sense of universal truth in terms of ordering hierarchical relations of social power as well as distinguishing good from bad, us from them.

Come 1975, the House Un-American Activities Committee met its demise, roughly coinciding with the decline of modernism. Six years later, MTV began broadcasting its dizzyingly limitless (or so it seemed) spectacular explosions of sounds, colors and words too irreverent to care about the confines of old-fashioned American sensibilities. In other words, the channel becomes a poster child for the dawn of postmodernity. The smell of teen rebellion and subversive anti-establishment aesthetics suddenly make their big break onto national TV, suggesting that the hegemonic reign of ‘The System’ is faltering. Coincidentally, the genesis of MTV also inaugurated the rise of Reagan-Thatcher neoliberalism, not to mention the intensified government repression of the 1960’s anti-capitalist, Black liberation, and youth counterculture movements. Hence, Fisher argues that the proliferation of anti-establishment entertainment, as seen on TV as well as embodied in despairing celebrity figures such as Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, were telling, not of new freedom, but of the market’s response to aimless generational despondency at neoliberalism crushing the prospects of alternative futures beyond capitalism.

The surface abundance of ideological diversity in postmodern mass entertainment is less a new freedom than it is a new form of control, evolving upon, rather than abolishing altogether, the ideological enclosures of the disciplinary society. The societies which populate postmodernity, in which meaning has shifted from the form of coherent metanarratives to fragmented, nonlinear flows of information, are what Deleuze calls societies of control. Whereas discipline locked the individual into an ideological metanarrative propagating the defined barracks of work-home-school-prison, control now “liberates” the individual onto a highway where it appears one is newly autonomous and mobile. Roads are continually opened so you may travel anywhere you want, as fast as you like (within limit), so long as you submit to disclosing at every road’s checkpoints, entrance, and exit where and who you are, know that you may be subject to surveillance at any time, that at any moment you may be pulled over and revoked of your freedom. Every road which supposedly represents your freedom also entails multiplied mechanisms of surveillance and control that render your freedom conditional. Moreover, your imagination of free mobility is wholly resigned to areas the state has sanctioned and littered with control technologies; to consider movement beyond the paved highways is unthinkable.

In the society of control, anti-establishment entertainment commodities operate like highways. On the condition that you defer your objectless rage and despair to the cues of mass media and channel your revolutionary zeal into ritualistic consumption—all the while allowing corporations and the state to surveil every movie ticket and TV title you consume— you may proceed to more sanctioned content. There is an enormous market for anti-capitalist media that dramatizes, often with ample gore and death, the systemic and everyday cruelties of capitalism. Parasite(2019), directed by Bong Joon-Ho, is nominally considered a timely critique of the brutality, delusion, and

desperation involved in class violence, which we see personified in the conflict between the impoverished Kim and ultra-wealthy Park families. The film has been celebrated by the most elite sectors of the Hollywood entertainment complex, notably making history, for example, as not only the first non-English language, but as the first supposedly anti-capitalist film to win Best Picture at the Oscars3. The artistry and talent behind Parasiteare certainly deserving of recognition, but it is worth wondering what becomes of a work’s political meaning as it is assimilated into the same structures it supposedly seeks to critique. Moreover, one must question whether a film that raked in $259 million in global revenue4 can truly transcend its role as a commodity sustained by and for the oppressive forces of capital. The success of Parasite suggests that capital has advanced to the point where it no longer needs to make an explicit case for itself in order to persist—further, that capital can even make highly profitable gestural critiques of itself to reproduce its own logic.

Dominant images of mass media delivered in the form of audio/visual spectacle serve as effective mechanisms of control because their very nature is to simulate reality with such precision and authority that the simulation of reality overcomes one’s original experience of social life. As Guy Debord argues in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle, the spectacle is not merely an assembly of images, it is “a social relation between people that is mediated by images. ”5 The spectacle does not exist as a stand-alone decoration of the world, born of neutral technologies; it is rather a direct reflection and justification of the conditions and projects entailed by the preexisting mode of production. As the spectacle, explicitly or not, reproduces signs of advanced capitalist production, signs come to replace the lived reality of everyday social life. Social life learns to organize itself around its very negation, the spectacle. In a context where social relations are colored by the exploitation and alienation characteristic of capitalism, the foremost goal of the spectacle is merely to continue developing itself and the ruling economic order which sustains it. It is no coincidence, then, that the elaboration of contemporary capitalism (and its respective hegemonic nation-states) have coincided with the intensification of spectacle’s omnipresence in everyday life—surely in the accelerated production of longer form media such as television and film but increasingly so as the constant flows of rapid-fire images and short form video clips encountered on social media as well. Though the latter form is not the focus of this paper, social media is another clarifying example of a case where spectacle has monopolized individual reality by devaluing the state of being in favor of appearing; with this example, one can also note how Deleuze’s society of control is expressed in corporate and state hyper-surveillance of user behavior as it relates to the abundant, apparently free-flowing diversity of spectacular content on social media feeds.

The shift from Foucault’s disciplinary society to the society of control expresses power’s adaptation to modes beyond repression in order to sustain itself and further develop capital. Societies of control exchanged the mode of repression for the guise of freedom and pleasure, resulting in a condition Fisher describes as depressive hedonia, 6 a compulsive need for instant pleasure that remains unsatisfactory. The spectacle lives at the heart of this new mode of repression, presenting itself as a form of pleasure and leisure where the subject can supposedly experience some level of freedom and escape from the drudgery of their active, working hours.

The anti-capitalist film implies a glimmering promise in its apparent declaration of rebellion against the bleak, dead-ended economic system the average consumer finds themself ensnared in. The blockbuster anti-establishment film masquerades as a fundamentally oppositional force to the very system of capital which sustains it, constructing, instead,

the appearance that it is allied with the interests of the economically exploited class. Bo Burnham’s Netflix comedy special Inside (2021) makes a claim to authenticity in its premise: a sheepishly self-aware white man in quarantine (who happens to have a $4 million net worth)7 films a series of tongue-in-cheek musical numbers that offer social commentary through songs like “How the World Works” where a sock puppet sings a grab-bag of what they didn’t teach you in history class, covering everything from worker alienation and Indigenous genocide to the “pedophilic corporate elite.” There are two songs maniacally cheering on hyper-villainized Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos—satirically, of course. Similar to Parasite, the special won three Emmy awards, proclaimed by Hollywood critics to be a masterful representation of the universal despair and anxiety felt by everyone living through COVID confinement, not to mention the myriad other political and economic crises characteristic of contemporary life. By personifying real time mass death and social turmoil into a one-man Netflix comedy show that makes a series of sweeping, vaguely anti-establishment generalizations about the state of the world, Inside masterfully compels its mass audience to adopt the commodity’s ironic distance from real social life. Relatedly, Debord writes that “complacent acceptance of the status quo may also coexist with purely spectacular rebelliousness. ”8 Deleuze discusses how in societies of control, corporations have souls; with Inside, we see how a multinational media conglomerate like Netflix can conceal its investment in the further development of capitalist exploitation by impressing upon consumers the notion that it cares to platform edgy, politically-conscious media while transposing Burnham’s self-awareness onto their corporate branding.

In relating to spectacle, the individual relinquishes their autonomous experience of social reality in favor of a social reality directed and produced by capital. When the individual relates their social experience to an artifact of mass entertainment, they are ultimately relating to the systems of production which that entertainment commodity represents in its form and content. This is fundamentally distinct from relating one’s social experience to that of another human because mass entertainment mediates social relations through the alienating and subjectless impulses of capital flow. In identifying oneself and the world with the purely capital-driven commodity form, even as it pretends to perform the subjective human experience, the individual abandons their subjecthood for a state of objecthood. The active labor of processing the social world as it is in its immediacy is deferred to the passive labor of endless pleasurable consumption. Watching anti-capitalist spectacle is a self-soothing mechanism that absolves the individual of their own responsibility in condoning capital—the multinational media conglomerate seduces the individual into believing their pursuit of commodity pleasure can exist separately from, and even in resistance to, the violence of capital. The passive spectator who aspires to conform their subjective world to the unreality of commodity objecthood merely becomes a receptacle for capital’s desires. This reflects Robert Pfaller’s notion of interpassivity9 wherein the anti-capitalist commodity absorbs and performs the labor of anticapitalism for the passive spectator who, in exchange, surrenders to the commodity’s primary desire: to further its reproduction via mass consumption that persists with impunity.

Gestural performance of anti-capitalist ideas lived vicariously through spectacle now constitutes evidence of one’s real political freedom and material resistance. It is easier to contemplate anti-capitalist spectacle and revolution than to contemplate the real conditions of capitalism and material possibilities of revolution beyond spectacle. Political empowerment is felt, not in bringing one’s body to protest or in organizing one’s immediate community, but rather in the performative act of retweeting alongside tens of thousands of other heavily

surveilled anonymous users the phrase “eat the rich.” Public discourse around real life events of worker exploitation are mediated by viral screencaps of television shows like Netflix’s Squid Game (2021), assimilating agitation around real instances of human injustice into the obfuscated unreality of corporate entertainment spectacle. If one cannot process social life and exercise political empowerment beyond the spectacle, the subject becomes entirely dependent on the continued generation of the mass commodity form.

The habitual concession of one’s subjecthood associated with the act of consuming anti-capitalist entertainment spectacle reinforces what Fisher calls capitalist realism: “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to imagine a coherent alternative to it. ”10 Though the anticapitalist film never makes an explicit argument for capitalism—in fact, appears to argue against it by representing it at its worst—space to imagine other viable political and economic systems is typically omitted. We see effects repeated in the highly stylized depiction of social violence but causes are mystified into implicit gestures at something or someone exceptionally evil. If the film discusses the cause of status quo social violence at all, it is a one-dimensional portrait of individual bad apples: the cruel corporation, the depraved and omnipotent CEO. On the other hand, anti-capitalist narratives may portray the exploited as powerless victims whose efforts to transcend their circumstance largely end in failure. At times, there may be the valorized individual who manages to transcend circumstance against all odds and acts as savior to the sorry masses. The exploited masses are cast as a character of pity and lost cause, met with short-lived shock but otherwise shown as fundamentally disposable. Repeated simulation of violence against the exploited for entertainment value desensitizes audiences to real-world brutality. The line between real and fictional images of oppression are blurred, building resemblance between the oppressed person and the movie character who ultimately only exists as an object of commodity.

Though less common, there are examples of mass entertainment which appear to break past capitalist realism, harnessing speculative science fiction to envision socially liberated futures. Directed by Ryan Coogler, the film adaptation of Marvel’s Black Panther (2018) weaves historical realities of Black diaspora, revolutionary decolonial struggle, and cultural lineage into the imagined world of Wakanda: an Afrofuturist utopia that rewrites dominant perceptions of Africa and the Black experience. The widely-felt significance of Black Panther as a profoundly celebratory and empowering tribute to Black culture and liberatory political futures is irrefutable. Still, as Achille Mbembe argues in a critical reading of the film,11 it simultaneously dilutes radical Afrofuturist aesthetics in favor of appeals to non-speculative American capitalist mythology. The destiny of the never-colonized utopic Black nation revolves around the extraction of a natural resource called ‘vibranium’—though, like in an Apple commercial, the exploitation of humans and the earth that is inherent in all extractive economies is never mentioned. The dream of Wakanda is individualized through savior protagonist T’challa whose character assimilates into the classic American dream male quest trope which the Marvel franchise is notorious for. In the last scene, under the approving gaze of Agent Ross, a white male character personifying the US government, T’challa declares to the United Nations in Vienna that Wakanda will end its vacation from history and open itself up to the rest of the world. Imperialism and capitalism alike rely on denying human subjectivity its very existence, insisting that the value of humanity lies only in its potential to be exploited either as or for the commodity form. The spectacle, when it is deployed as a weapon of domination, follows this same logic when it generates

hegemonic fantasies that themselves replace human subjective experience of reality with capital-driven social reality. If all the anti-capitalist film does is denounce the effects of this reality to the masses, told in a way permitted by the ruling class of Hollywood—and ask only that the masses contemplate these effects as the passive, innocent consumer, thus becoming stranger to their collective and personal social circumstance—then there is no such thing as the anti-capitalist film. As Irwin Silber writes:

In reality the area of ‘permitted protest’ of the System is much greater than the System is willing to admit. This gives the artists [and subjugated art spectators] the illusion that they are acting ‘against the system’ by going beyond certain narrow limits; they do not realize that even anti-System art can be absorbed and utilized by the System, as both a brake and a necessary self-correction.12

The society of control subtly modulates itself by castrating and assimilating all works of culture that might allow the exploited human to move past the ruling class’s assembly of mirages. For the exploited class to recognize reality absent inversion and distortion would reveal far more than its profound violence because of this we are already well aware. More importantly, this would expose the naked fragility of a reality wholly directed by appearances and hence, the urgent possibilities to subvert hegemonic spectacle in favor of a culture that is actively created, not passively consumed, in the spirit of militant revolution. The audiovisual cinematic spectacle has unparalleled power to seduce individuals into aestheticized reality just as much as documented reality, to gather attention and incite the exchange of testimonial by everyday people, to locate again truth in all its lived expressions. This is the third cinema as Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino envision it: “films that the System cannot assimilate and which are foreign to its needs, […] that directly and explicitly set out to fight the System. ”13 Hollywood will never sell workers of the world a ticket out of capitalist realism. The works that will collectively erode away and build past capitalist realism will have nothing to do with Hollywood superhero tropes and Academy Awards because they will be fundamentally indigestible to the architecture of capital.

Niels Niessen discusses an example of Third Cinema aesthetics as they were deployed by the Black Panther Party in 1969, Oakland:

The film’s opening is jarring. On the sound of drums, the film shows a montage sequence of the windows of its party’s offices smashed by police bullets, followed by an interview with Newton from jail. “In America,” Newton speaks, “the police . . . are there to contain us, to brutalize us, to murder us, because they have their orders to do, just like the soldiers in Vietnam.”14

Here, realityis not mystified or hidden; it is directly implicated through human testimonial. There is no stylized superhero nor villain, but rather an international ‘us’ against militarized actors carrying out orders—orders intended to suppress resistance and further the developments of US imperialist capitalism. In the foreground of the film is Huey P. Newton, a revolutionary organizer speaking both through his personal experience of the world as well as in solidarity with Black liberation and decolonial movements. A “jarring” and unapologetically political film that explicitly indicted the U.S. on charges of ordering murder and brutality on a global scale could not have fed capital’s insatiable appetite for a circus of phantasmic realities. However, what it could do,along with other cinema of liberation that insist on operating outside and against capital, is help the masses feel and, most importantly, act upon a hunger they may have lost sight of prior—a way out of the circus.

Endnotes 1 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of

Control,” October 59 (1992): 3–7. 2 “Waldorf Statement,” 1947.

3 Dan Hassler-Forest, “Bong Joon-Ho: Love in the

Time of Capitalism,” Los Angeles Review of Books,

May 1, 2020, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/bong-joon-ho-love-in-the-time-of-capitalism/. 4 “Parasite,” Box Office Mojo, 2019, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt6751668/. 5 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, MI:

Black and Red, 1977). 6 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2010). 7 Rybecca Quinn, “What Is Bo Burnham's Net

Worth?,” The Cold Wire, December 22, 2021, https://www.thecoldwire.com/bo-burnham-networth/. 8 Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 23. 9 Fisher, “Bong Joon-Ho,” 12-13. 10 Fisher, 2. 11 Niels Niessen, “Black Panther Transmedia: The

Revolution Will Not Be Streamed,” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 60, no. 5 (2021): 121-149, https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2021.0022. 12 Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “TO-

WARD A THIRD CINEMA,” Cinéaste 4, no. 3 (1970): 1-12, https://doi.org/https://www.jstor.org/stable/41685716. 13 Solanas and Getino, 12. 14 Niessen, “Black Panther Transmedia,” 136.