In 2022, Mainstream Cinema Took Aim at the Powerful but not Power
After a rough couple of years, it’s an absolute relief that 2022 brought with it a full slate of movies, mostly¹ unimpeded by COVID! If you look beyond the glut of Marvels, Jurassics and Minionses, it has been a solid year for cinema with really strong Hollywood and international blockbusters, decent Oscar hopefuls and some truly astounding arthouse and genre fare².
Although art mostly lies downstream from culture, mass media flows through the Hollywood studio system before it reaches our screens, picking up enough societal detritus that it becomes a bit of a fool’s errand to make any definitive conclusions about the culture that spawned it. Nobody has as much invested in Hollywood as Oscar voters. Nobody believes in the sanctity of journalism quite like journalists with screen deals. Nobody cares as much about the US military as US military consultants on these films. The biggest films of the year reflected the industry that made them first, and the wider culture second.³
So with all the above caveats, think of this as a rough overview of some of the socio-political themes that filmmakers were reflecting in their work in the early 2020s. Specifically, who did these filmmakers want to frame as the ‘bad guys’ in their films?
¹ Give or take a Killers of the Flower Moon
² FWIW, my favourites of 2022 were: 15 - Everything Everywhere All At Once, 14 - Neptune Frost, 13 - Smoking Causes Coughing, 12 - Crimes of the Future, 11 - RRR, 10 - Triangle of Sadness, 9 - We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, 8 - Godland, 7 - Mad God, 6 - Skinamarink, 5 - Aftersun, 4 - Kainga, 3 - Benedetta, 2 - Stars at Noon, 1 - After Yang
³ In the same way, the construct of a ‘2022 movie year’ needs to be taken with a massive grain of salt. These are new films that I saw as they came out in New Zealand during the year. My idea of a ‘2022 movie’ includes films that came out in their own countries in 2021, festival screenings that may not get wide releases until 2023 and movies that have been in production for a couple of years–some will have taken even longer due to the role that COVID disruption may have played on their schedule.
Colonisers
In my opinion, the most notable recurring villain across 2022’s films was the figure of ‘the coloniser’. Historical epics, genre films and documentaries from across national cinemas all dabbled in themes of Indigenous resistance (with varying levels of success and sincerity). Most notably, they were co-opted by two of the highest-profile Hollywood films of the year.
Avatar: The Way of Water is a whole lot of film. Like its predecessor, it is both a white saviour story and a subversion of that narrative. It is a film that unambiguously calls for violent Indigenous resistance against colonisers but was made on stolen land in Aotearoa with a largely non-Indigenous cast and crew. It features some unbelievably moving scenes about our relationship with non-human animals and some of the stupidest dialogue this side of Avatar 1. James Cameron is one of Hollywood’s most technically proficient filmmakers and its most notorious bad bosses. Avatar is a film about relinquishing one’s own white privilege… by growing dreadlocks.
Its politics are knotty and complicated and problematic and will be dissected in the coming years by people with way more authority than me. But the idea of Indigenous uprising against colonisers is so literal and uncompromising in Avatar it is hard to ignore, even more so given how at odds it is with the material conditions in which it was made.
Like Avatar, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever uses a fantastic race of blue sea people (here the descendents of superpowered Mayans)--to explore ideas of Indigeneity, environmentalism and anti-colonial resistance. However its politics are much more straightforward than Avatar’s. Like most Disney/Marvel films, it is liberal apologism for the American empire. It initially appears to take seriously the fact that Namor’s Talokan and Shuri’s Wakanda are under siege from white nations who want their resources but that idea takes a backseat when the true threat emerges. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the most evil thing you can want is a better world, and the colonisers eventually become secondary villains to the real bad guy: a colonised supervillain who commits the crime of being too angry about being colonised (like the first film’s Killmonger).
Black Panther pays lip-service to anti-colonialism. Wakanda’s most reliable white ally, Martin Freeman’s CIA(!!!) agent is affectionately referred to as ‘Coloniser’ by Shuri, but she knows that she can always rely on him when Third-Worldism threatens her absolute monarchy.
It was also a huge year for everyone who likes to see colonisers getting merked in historical settings. The most entertaining of these films was the Tollywood sensation RRR, an action spectacular that is fun enough to make well-meaning cinephiles want to overlook its Hindutva politics.
The biggest Malaysian film of all time was released in 2022. Mat Kilau lacked the well-directed action and plausible deniability of RRR’s ethnonationalism and instead opted to focus on the Chinese, non-Malay Indigenous peoples and especially Sikhs as the face of Britain’s crimes in the archipelago. It is the most overtly Fascist film I saw during the year.
The Woman King was a solid middle-of-the-road war film about slavers getting what’s coming to them. It also received criticism for the creative liberties it took with its subjects’ complicity in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Closer to home, Muru reframed the 2007 Tūhoe raids as an action thriller and ended up being a phenomenally gripping and effective film about settler colonialism being an ongoing system, rather than a historical event.
Prey was an awesome film about how the Predator™ is a much more honourable opponent for its Comanche protagonist than the crew of disgusting French fur trappers she has to face.
Sometimes the psychic toll of colonisation is emphasised over explicit colonial violence. The excellent South African horror film Good Madam is set “post-apartheid”⁴ and there is no explicit interpersonal racism on screen (and barely any white characters with lines). Instead, the racism that fuels its plot lingers like a spectre, revealing itself in throwaway lines of dialogue, set design and subtle choices in costumes and performances.
Farha received a lot of criticism from zionists for the crime of centring Palestinians in the story of their own ethnic cleansing but it is a much more restrained and subtle depiction of resistance against colonisation than most of the above.
Finally, a massive shoutout to the exhilarating Afrofuturist musical Neptune Frost which is the rare science fiction film to meaningfully envisage a utopian future. This is the closest cinema came in 2022 to truly contending with a future beyond colonialism.
⁴ Keeping in mind that saying ‘post-apartheid’ makes about as much sense as ‘post-colonial’ or ‘post-COVID’--a fact about which this film is keenly aware.
Cinema Technology
The antagonistic role of ‘technology’ is not a novel idea in the least. Science fiction has always explored the tension that exists in the space between luddism and tech utopianism. However, technology has never looked less utopian than it did in 2022 (at least not within living memory)--particularly with regards to the way in which we engage with film. The number of people who view our tech billionaires as anything other than dangerous grifters is shrinking rapidly, our brains are all fried from viewing the pandemic through our devices and consolidation of capital and IP by streaming platforms may end cinema as we know it.
While Avatar dabbles in anti-technological themes (the Na’vi religion elevates simple constructions and stands in stark contrast to human tech), the biggest achievement in luddite cinema has gotta be Top Gun Maverick. Even as Netflix and Disney Plus have vertically integrated, chipping away at the competitive advantage of cinemas, Tom Cruise has stood up for the movie-going experience. He might belong to a dangerous sci-fi cult but Cruise represents the analogue past: he does his own stunts in lieu of CGI, rallies against motion smoothing settings on your TV and refuses to age. The best American action movie of 2022 was a celebration of everything Tom Cruise purports to represent.
Top Gun repeatedly calls back to the first film, with a very similar narrative structure and set pieces. Its text yearns for the military of 1986 while its subtext does the same for the cinema of 1986 (nevermind the technical advances that make the sequel a much better film). Cruise’s Maverick must face off against an unmanned-aircraft-loving admiral called ‘The Drone Ranger’ (Ed Harris) and an ambiguous enemy against which America has no technological advantage. In the final set piece, he commandeers an F14–a plane that predates the first film by over a decade. Like Maverick, Tom Cruise is a guy who cares about a time when technology was gruntier and more personal. Harris says to him “The end is inevitable Maverick. Your kind is headed for extinction,” and he responds: “Maybe so sir, but not today.” Cinephiles rejoice!
A much more nuanced look at the changing role of film technology is Jordan Peele’s Nope. Like Top Gun it looks back towards cinema history… all the way back to the very first filmed image: Edward Muybridge’s shot of a black man riding a horse. Unlike Top Gun though, its view of film history is decidedly less rose-tinted. The Western theme park where much of the action takes place is a constant reminder of the way lies about America’s violent racist past are built into Hollywood’s DNA. Steven Yeun’s character is in denial about the trauma he endured on a film set as a child actor. Even the role that Muybridge’s footage plays in the characters’ family history may be apocryphal.
For the characters of Nope, existing on the edges of the economy that supports the film industry, the only way they can think to deal with an extraterrestrial visitor is to treat it like the subject in a movie: training it, filming it and profiting off it. Each of them is a hammer and this alien is a nail. Without spoiling the film, I think it is fair to say that Peele is at best ambivalent about technological solutions to this threat and at worst adamant that this kind of thinking is built upon a foundation of lies.
Among the other films that came out in 2022, the latest entry in the found footage anthology series V/H/S/99 is also worth noting for its general scepticism towards film technology. Set in the most important year for the sub-genre, it features a segment that I liked as much as any 2022 feature: Ozzy’s Dungeon, the Legends of the Hidden Temple-inspired segment directed by weirdo rapper Flying Lotus. The quality of the other segments varies from pretty average to pretty good but, by the end of the anthology, the age-old found footage question resonates here (just as it did in Nope, the Taiwanese found footage Incantation and the wonderful volcanologist documentary Fire of Love): “why on earth are you still filming?!”
‘The rich’
Mainstream American cinema has never had a particularly developed sense of class consciousness. Liberal class-exclusionary politics have been the rule, rather than the exception, in Hollywood since at least the Clinton years. However, with the divide between rich and poor reaching never-before-seen levels (particularly since the American presidency was won by a guy whose whole deal was that he played a rich guy on TV), cinema has increasingly been comfortable saying ‘fuck the rich’.
For a lot of these films, ‘fuck the rich’ is about the extent of their politics. The Menu is a fun wee romp about ‘the servers’ getting revenge on ‘the served’. However it traffics in some truly out-of-date class signifiers. Its plot revolves on ‘fine dining’ tropes that would have seemed hacky had Denis Leary trotted them out 25 years ago and sets these meals in opposition to ‘real food’ like hamburgers⁵. It also seems genuinely confused as to which side of the class divide a celebrity chef might belong to. To be fair, Americans are new to this conversation–they want to start talking about inequality and who’s to judge them if the only way they can articulate that is by saying ‘imagine a burger’.
There is one realm though, in which Americans do regularly talk about class–Elon Musk’s Twitter. This is a place where conversations about privilege and inequality are guaranteed to happen again and again, in the least helpful way, often divorced from real-world implications. Without Twitter and its maddeningly facile discourse, Rian Johnson would have a much more difficult time screenwriting. For Glass Onion, much like the first Knives Out, is a film that hinges on capital-D Discourse.
Sure, it has a wonderful cast of likeable celebrities (it’s by design that fan casting for this series is one of Twitter’s favourite pastimes), and it playfully rejects genre conventions (much like Johnson’s Star Wars film, which I liked a lot more than this) but everything about it seems engineered to criticise the rich in the most ‘online’ way. The unsympathetic characters are all types Johnson may have tussled with online: men’s right activists, ‘cancelled’ celebrities, billionaires and their sycophants (it’s a wonder he didn’t include a Russian villain). These characters talk about all of 2020’s hottest issues like COVID inequality, ‘wokeness’ and cancel culture. Its billionaire villain is bad, not because he’s a billionaire, but because he’s stupid. It’s a perfect storm created in a lab to elicit the most possible clapter from libs without having to meaningfully interrogate their own role in these structures. Its fans are upset that Glass Onion got such a short run in cinemas but honestly, it seems like a perfect film for Netflix–all the better to screenshot its ‘slay’ dialogue for Twitter.
It is probably no surprise then, that the best anti-rich film of 2022 is not American. Triangle of Sadness is the third of Ruben Östlund’s trilogy about the privileged being confronted with their privilege. It is not a perfect film by any means; I’d rank it below Östlund’s Force Majeure but above The Square. What I love about Triangle of Sadness, is that its three-part structure follows up its first two chapters: obvious (but very funny) critiques of the rich, with a third that takes its class politics to their logical conclusion. The end of the film smartly considers class alongside labour, race and gender to demonstrate an awareness of power dynamics that the aforementioned films are really lacking.
Another European perspective on the rich comes from Dutch filmmaker Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies. Although it pays lip service to class politics in the way that its college dropout protagonist navigates a party hosted by her rich girlfriend’s friends, it is much more interested in generational politics. There are some great gags about the way its zoomer cast justify all kinds of terrible behaviour with the language of therapy (particularly Rachel Sennott who gives one of the funniest performances of the year) but there isn’t a lot going on other than sneering at young (rich, American) people.
It’s probably worth noting that two of the most talked about seasons of TV in 2022 were returning HBO shows about horrible rich people. This is a company that has made its name with great series about unsympathetic characters. Succession is impeccably crafted but is too invested in Shakespearean double-crossing to fully embrace the dumbness of the ultra-wealthy. The White Lotus takes a more fatalistic approach: not only are its rich characters doomed to become worse people but they will probably get away with all their crimes–the best the poor can hope for is to get their ticket clipped.
⁵ Nevermind that ‘real food’ has been fully coopted by the wealthy in 2022–as any Wellingtonian can attest to.
Hollywood Sickos
Since the MeToo movement hit the mainstream with Harvey Weinstein’s outing as a serial rapist in 2017, Hollywood has had to confront the way its entire business model is predicated on the powerful (usually men) wielding power over those who want to make it in the industry (usually young women)⁶. Due to the amount of time it takes to make a movie, compounded by COVID, this is still a relatively new topic in Hollywood cinema. While the industry has made some structural changes following its reckoning, its scope and impact have been less than revolutionary. In 2022, this was painfully obvious when one of the most noxious figures in Hollywood, Johnny Depp, was able to ride a reactionary backlash against MeToo and credulous media coverage to return to relevance.
It’s particularly galling given this current moment, that the first film to dramatise Weinstein’s comeuppance is a triumphant celebration of the power of journalism. She Said will likely be remembered as little more than a middlebrow Oscar hopeful. I will remember it for the way that Zoe Kazan framed it as a tribute to all those women whose careers have been ruined by the likes of Weinstein even though she has defended her grandfather who wielded his power to ruin the careers of many in the 1950s. To me, this is an example of Hollywood hypocrisy on par with George Clooney’s maligned acceptance speech and a powerful example of the way the industry has failed to meaningfully contend with its shameful history.
It seems that the most lasting legacy of MeToo may just be the way it has allowed ‘Hollywood sicko’ as a shorthand way to establish an evil character. In a genre film, all you need to do is portray a guy as a sleazy movie industry type and you can save so much time on character development. In 2022, this was done best in the very fun Barbarian but this type of character was also used to great effect in the aforementioned V/H/S/99, The Menu and The White Lotus. A variation can also be seen in X and Red Rocket which both feature porn industry sickos wreaking havoc in small-town Texas.
Todd Field’s Tár, and Damien Chazelle’s Babylon come out in New Zealand in 2023 but from all the buzz I’ve heard so far, these seem like they grapple with similar themes.
⁶ IMO the best ‘MeToo’ films are The Assistant and Nina Wu, both from 2019.
Toxic Masculinity
Perhaps this is an extension of the previous category, but a lot of 2022 films featured shitty men as antagonists.
Primarily among these (surprise surprise) is Alex Garland’s atrocious Men. This is a film that drips with white British feminism and gender essentialism that is so bad I started to question my love for Garland’s previous feminist genre films: Ex Machina and Annihilation. In it, Jessie Buckley’s heroine is grieving the loss of her shitty boyfriend and is set upon by Men™. There is no structural critique of patriarchy. Here, masculinity is something primal and rooted in nature. Old men, little boys, the wealthy and the homeless alike pose a threat to her and they will stop at nothing, including crude imitations of femininity (did I mention this was a TERF film) to invade her space.
Men is an outlier though. Most of the time it is not masculinity in general but a certain type of masculinity that these films stand against. In The Batman, the caped crusader squares off against Catwoman, the Riddler and the Penguin but his ultimate enemy is legions of gross men shitposting on the internet. Matt Reeves’ superhero reboot has replaced the reactionary politics of Christopher Nolan’s trilogy with liberal ones and (even though I really liked a lot about this film) they’re admittedly a much more awkward fit for a film about a billionaire beating up the poor. This idea that radicalised right-wingers online are the biggest threat to society is a popular one with liberals at the moment and allows them to divert critiques from structures and capital. It’s a hacky point to make, but were the world of Batman at all realistic, then billionaires like Bruce Wayne would be recognised as a much greater threat to society than the incels he pummels but obviously you need to buy the premise for the film to work.
Misogynists with internet connections were also important villains in The Gawkers (another of V/H/S/99’s segments) and TV’s risible She-Hulk. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair took the idea of a faceless man menacing you through the internet and very smartly subverted it for compelling ends.
Also, shoutout to the shitty men of Mr Organ, Bones and All and Resurrection who were some of the year’s most compelling villains.
See Also
Several films focused on characters who just can’t help but make art (even if it kills them) including The Fabelmans, The Banshees of Inisherin, Pearl, Crimes of the Future, The Impossible Weight of Massive Talent and Flux Gourmet.
‘Hopepunk’ cinema is still with us as seen in the way the protagonists of Everything Everywhere All At Once and Thor: Love and Thunder had to face off against incarnations of nihilism.
Perennial villain, Christian hypocrisy, featured in the likes of Godland, Benedetta, Whina and Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio.
Twenty-twenty two is also the year in which white people found out about Djinn. They featured prominently in Three Thousand Years of Longing, Ms. Marvel and What We Do in the Shadows.
Hollywood isn’t anywhere near ready to talk about COVID in a meaningful way but casual mask use could be seen in Glass Onion, Three Thousand Years of Longing, The Worst Person in the World and Claire Denis’ two films: Stars at Noon and Both Sides of the Blade. Pearl and White Noise found excuses within their period settings for their characters to mask up.
So who were the villains in 2022 film?
It feels benign to the point of redundancy to say it but Hollywood films, for the most part, continue to reflect the anxieties of American Liberals–particularly as they contend with the Trump years.
That means sexism, racism, ostentatious wealth and a changing media landscape are all fair game but the structures that underlie these are still taboo. The most prominent film about Indigenous struggle was able to be made here because our film industry shits all over workers, many of them Māori. The most prominent film about the threat posed by technology is US military propaganda. The most prominent film about Hollywood’s own fucked up power structures stars someone who enthusiastically defends those same structures when they benefit her.
Making a movie is rarely, in and of itself, a political act (nor is watching a movie, regardless of what Twitter tells you) and I adored several movies in 2022 with iffy politics. Having said that, there were a whole lot of movies with excellent politics outside the mainstream. For the most part, cinema is happily talking about incels and colonialism and Harvey Weinstein and Elon Musk. However, very few films actually acknowledge what a society might have to look like to get rid of these things.
Jimmy Lanyard is an unexceptional Pākehā public servant from Te Whanganui-a-Tara. While he is not doing Borat impressions for the graduate advisors, he enjoys matching his sneakers with his Barkers suit, drinking almond flat whites and watching supercuts of Air New Zealand safety videos. Listen to Jimmy talk about film on Dinner and a Movie podcast with Nabilah Husna Binte Abdul Rahman.