oyou's remarks on readings of
The Dark Knight makes some important points about ideology. Focusing on the supposed "message" of the film – as both neoconservative interpretations of the film, and their critics, including me, do – is in danger of missing the way in which ideology works in capitalism. The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief. It is impossible to conceive of fascism or Stalinism without propaganda - but capitalism can proceed perfectly well, indeed better, without anyone making a case for it.
In the responses to
The Dark Knight I posted
here, it was Wayne Wedge who captured the way that the film functions as a hyper-object in late capitalism. The very multivalence of
The Dark Knight, its capacity to generate radically different interpretations, to elicit discourse, is what makes it a highly efficient meta-commodity. A text with a single monologic Message, even supposing such a thing could exist, would not be able to 'provoke the debate' which capitalist culture now feeds upon.
It not only that a cultural object can be opposed to capitalism on the level of content, but it serve it on the level of form; one could convincingly go further and argue that the ideology of capitalism is now 'anti-capitalist'. The villain in Hollywood films is routinely the 'evil multinational corporation'. So it is, once again, in Disney/ Pixar's
Wall-E, which, like
The Dark Knight, has provoked all kinds of bizarre conservative readings. "This is perhaps the most cynical and darkest big-budget Disney film ever," claims
Kyle Smith. "Perhaps never before has any corporation spent so much money on insulting its customers. (By way of parenthesis, since it isn't relevant to my argument here, this, from
Paul Edwards, is priceless: "WALL-E is the story of what results when a liberal vision of the future is achieved: government marries business in the interest of providing not only 'the pursuit of happiness' but happiness itself, thus creating gluttonous citizens dependent on the government to sustain their lives.")