Various movies (catching up after a hiatus)

This blog post will be different from some of the pervious. Instead of focusing on a single film, I will focus on a single facet of ideology from various perspectives and examine how it can be seen in the thematic elements of various movies.

For example, a commonly reoccurring trope in cinema is the idea of the sub-reality, or the world beneath the surface of our perception. Either fantastical or mundane, the alternate world is important because its discovery or acceptance recognizes an alternative facet of reality that structures and maintains our perception of normalcy. Interacting with this world, therefore bridges the gap between the subject and ideology.

One interesting example of this is Coppala's The Godfather (1972). The mob's patriarch, Vito, tries to create some outward illusion of normalcy to his son Michael instead of having him involved in criminal activity. For Vito to be happy, he needs his son to be ignorant of what's going on in order to preserve his innocence and protect him from rival families or the police. However, Michael is not stupid and he is very much aware of what's going on, yet he puts on the outward appearance of ignorance in order to appease his family. As the viewer continues to watch the characters develop, it becomes clear that the illusion of Michael's ignorance is a shared social illusion in which everyone knows that Michael knows about the mob, yet also outwardly "knows" that he knows nothing. Michael himself projects this dual identity, as he proves a competent leader when he needs to take control of the operations, yet prior he was seen by everyone (including himself) as the "kid" without any real exposure to the criminal world.

The example set by the Corleones in The Godfather shows how ideology itself is constructed, often willingly and knowingly, by social groups in order to fulfill latent desires and create an outward appearance of harmony or certainty. Of course, this ideological structure is prone to collapse with the intrusion of outside forces that make everyone question the solidity of their own identity, which itself is another commonly repeated theme in film.

An example of this can be found in Big Trouble in Little China (1986), a film by John Carpenter that has some thematic parallels with his later film They Live (1988). The outsider and loner, much like in They Live, is partially removed from the standard ideological structures of the world in which he enters, so his very presence ends up being disruptive and collapsing the substructures that exist underneath the surface of ordinary society. In both films, there is a deeper truth to be discovered that forces the protagonist to question his own ideological lens through which he views the world. In the case of Big Trouble in Little China, the truth is revealed that ancient Chinese legends are real and that monsters and magic are all around us, yet hidden by our own ideological preconceptions. While in many ways less radical than They Live, Big Trouble in Little China manages to address similar notes about how ideology works and functions in society.


One thing to keep in mind is that ideology is not necessarily a force or some sort of shaping entity, but is something that interacts dialectically with that which it influences. The subject is not some wholly disempowered, brainwashed zombie that is incapable of seeing outside ideology. In Birdman (2014), we see the power of the subconscious to create broad webs of ideology, but also the power of the ego to overcome and see through these webs. Although there are many more details of the movie that will be overlooked in this analysis, it is clear that the moments in which the protagonist struggles with his past "alter-ego" of Birdman, he is forced to confront his own fears and insecurities, as well as struggle with his own libidinal desires for power and control over himself, even though he has none.

The struggle for control over oneself (against what? One's subconscious? Is the subconscious an external force or a culmination of repressed desires?) brings up an interesting dilemma about the nature of ideology. Is the goal to create an authentic, positive and life-affirming ideology to structure our reality? Or is it necessary to reject ideology for an anarchic, chaotic web of signs without any preconception of unity between them? We see this struggle in Birdman as the protagonist struggles both with problems of the film's internal logical structures and the influences from outside (the "real" world), which often informs his perspective more than things even within the contained ideological ecology of his own world. This dialectical structure points to ideology as being a mediator, much like a Platonic demiurge, and although this is in interesting perspective, I am unsure about its universality as a concept. Regardless, the dialog is interesting in of itself and is something that more movies should explore.