Everything I don’t like is fascist.

Ancient Liberal Proverb

Cinema is not a fascist enterprise at this point in time. Arguably, a majority of cinema is centre-right, despite protests of liberal/socialist/Marxist/whateverthefuckist brainwashing invoked by neocons and YouTube rant artists everywhere. Popular cinema, western cinema largely exists to uphold and reinforce the status quo of a neoliberal order.

The material that veers more to the right of that - say, evangelical cinema - is often cast as an unhealthy aside, something to be derided and mildly cautious of in equal measure. Laughable plotting, pulpit speeches, a crude facsimile of a very subtle, technical, and artistic film grammar that even the layman can observe as broken within its facade. Stuff that only speaks to a guaranteed audience, and no one else. Evangelical Cinema, Libertarian Cinema, whatever, is largely the blown load of men who can’t contain their rabid impulses. They’re the Steve King of our cinema landscape. Unable to fathom the long game. Unable to play by the rules of neoliberal order, because their siege mentality thinks that order is working against them. It’s important to acknowledge the creators of evangelical cinema are not the best and brightest in the game. They are a niche, a vocal minority at best, and largely unthreatening, but a pleasant distraction to which we can focus our theatre picketing efforts once or twice a year, or something. It’s not for me, but more power to you.

Then there’s the other side, the emergent side, which is still carving out an identity and space in our media landscape. A side that’s been warmly received, and which is what makes S. Craig Zahler, the director of Dragged Across Concrete, Brawl in Cell Block 99, and Bone Tomahawk so fascinating and scary and admirable and watchable. I’ve repeated this in many conversations with many people: S. Craig Zahler is a fascist. His films are exclusively about good people succumbing to a degenerate world. They’re regressive in terms of their racial and social politics (Bone Tomahawk ends with an unflinching massacre of a bloodthirsty “Troglodyte” tribe of Indigenous people by white settlers, Brawl in Cell Block 99 hinges on the bad guy aborting the main character’s unborn child), they’re hateful of women, criminals, substance users, people of colour, and everyone but the men who aspire to success within a nuclear unit. They’re a rich milieu of violent cleansing, of Aryan entitlement, autocratic power, and arbitrary-yet-seductive moral entitlements. They’re films about good men broken by circumstance purifying a degenerate world and becoming martyrs in the process. It’s disgusting. It’s also a shame that Zahler’s cinema is also spectacularly good.

Let me explain.

A part of it is their transgressive, or outright hateful elements. For a certain audience, a film like Dragged Across Concrete invokes the world of Dirty Harry and the French Connection, simultaneously a slickly modern throwback to cop fantasies of the good old days, while also being anathema to a world that performatively polices language, representation, identity and action in the most superficial of ways. Another is their literary construction and tightly crafted aesthetic. Zahler is a genuine cineaste; his films are long, and oftentimes as ponderous as they are violent. What moralizing exists within them comes from a place of character, and it usually sounds like poetry. He is a master of the slow burn, locking you into his misanthropic worlds in such a way that you can’t come out, even if you want to.

His choices in actors range from the obvious, like Kurt Russell in the Neo-Western Bone Tomahawk, to the unexpected, like Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughan in Dragged Across Concrete. Particularly with Dragged Across Concrete (And partially with Vaughan in Brawl in Cell Block 99), Zahler takes two of the most hated men in Hollywood, both of whom are partial pariahs due to their all around shittiness as people, and channels a sense of rage, what feels like their inherent, lived feelings of being treated unfairly, and generates unbelievably sharp performances. Zahler tunes his actors until they hum with feeling; they explode in violent melodies and never let a chord slip, never hit a note too loudly. Sure, maybe there isn’t a new technique present in Zahler’s films. Maybe it’s just updates of neo-noir and western tropes, but somehow, it works.

This is what makes Zahler so insidious. His films are very good, and critics like them, content be damned. All three of his films are certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. Many critics cite the devil may care attitude and politics of his cinema as positives. Oftentimes, they’re likened to exploitation films, which play by a separate set of political rules than everyday cinema fare. To me, this comparison feels out of place: Exploitation films are not classified by their goriness. There’s a certain winking nature of the material, a kind of pleasure that comes from being unbound to the screen, because you’re in on the joke. There’s no joke to be in on in Zahler’s worlds. His world is one of taut indifference, and played, completely, totally straight. I’ve seen comparisons to Italian Giallo cinema as well, in the case of Bone Tomahawk. Giallo cinema has conventions that none of Zahler’s cinema exhibits. “Inspired by” might be a better way to classify it.

As an aside: Zahler has written the screenplay for one bona-fide exploitation flick, about a Nazi puppet that comes to life and starts killing queers, blacks, women and Jews. Hmm.

Back to the critics. I think there is a discomfort for many critics that review Zahler’s movies, one that forces them to liken those movies to “lesser art” in order to justify their experience. It’s impossible in our current critical landscape to say that a film which holds explicitly or at the very least veers towards a fascist bent is good, at least not honestly. I’m not suggesting our critics are closet fascists. I’m suggesting that there’s a space for great cinema that bucks the norms of neoliberal thought, a cinema that, because of its spectacular craft and moral differentiation, is largely overlooked for its messaging and rewarded for its difference, and a fascist has occupied the space for that cinema. Socialists haven’t. The anti-capitalist left has a piss poor literacy of our media landscape, essentially a worthless peanut gallery in the nosebleeds of one of our most powerful cultural and educational theatres.

The fact is this: Our critical landscape has, largely to this point, demonstrated its inability to challenge, critically or otherwise, the new fascist cinema and the figure at its helm. In fact, it has largely embraced it.

How the alt-right, on the other hand, hasn’t latched onto Zahler as a cinematic savior, their Scorsese, or their Coppola, is confounding. It’s there, but nowhere near to the degree you’d imagine. Zahler, a self professed centre-right, Jew turned atheist, is not a particularly unlikely channel through which this new cinema manifests itself. Zahler’s not a dumb guy. He knows what it means to cast Mel Gibson in his film about a racist cop. He knows the political message of his own movies, and he’s gone on the record saying he doesn’t give a shit about anyone’s criticisms of them. Maybe reactionaries haven’t responded to Zahler’s cinema because they’re embraced by the “liberal elite,” though, I doubt this is the case. Maybe it’s Zahler’s choice in cast - Vaughan and Gibson haven’t been politically relevant in a long time. I would hardly call them alt-right figures. I imagine, though, that Zahler would embrace the idea of making an art film about an incel played by Pewdiepie. I think something to that effect is inevitable, maybe not from Zahler, though. Anyway, it’s coming. There will be more Zahlers. There are going to be more great, popular films that lean us into modes of fascist thought. It’s happening already, and we’re not literate enough when it comes to movies to identify it. The days of so-bad-it’s-funny evangelical cinema are rapidly diminishing, and what is going to replace it will be indistinguishable from anything you see at the multiplex. Neoliberalism and fascism are good bedfellows, because the shade change between the two can be, and often is, imperceptible.

I’m not saying we need to ban S Craig Zahler from making movies. There’s a tenuous world his films exist in, and just enough culpability within them to make an argument against the one I’m making here (For example: The character that makes it out alive at the end of Dragged Across Concrete is a black ex-con). This is what makes his cinema cunning, and also what makes it difficult to contain. If cinema is a semiotic exercise, and fascism relies deeply on symbology to explore and reproduce itself, the mode of fascism we will see laid bare in our political landscape will have generous morsels that create little hits of allyship dopamine in the neoliberal brain stem. It will have representation. It might be queer friendly. It will find friends in Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs. It will locate its own form of degeneracy regardless, and seek to destroy it. I suspect it will be more of an Italian fascism than a German one.

Staving off fascism isn’t about creating films that are respectful of performative neoliberalism. It’s actually not about policing the content we create. But it’s important to recognize the way that films inoculate us from being able to critically interrogate the iconography and ideals of fascism. It’s important to understand that bad people make good things with bad messages and interrogate those messages. It’s important to hold the artists accountable for those messages, and, especially, create messages counter to the ones presented.

To suggest Roman Polanski or Woody Allen never made a good film, for example, isn’t a brave statement. It is, in fact, one that makes you look very stupid, and hamstrings the ways in which we prevent bad people from being allowed to create good things. Triumph of the Will is a masterpiece. S Craig Zahler is a great director of cinema. These are facts, to me. Don’t write off these films, or these directors, if everyone else hasn’t, because it achieves nothing. Even if it means nothing to you, it means a lot to others, sometimes in an academic sense, and much more often than not, much deeper and soulfully than that. It’s gross, but it’s also true.

We accept our cinema, the cinema of superheroes and prestige drama and feminist comedy, as an extension, largely of our moral values as a society, with minor transgression on social (but never economic) issues that often lags behind the liberatory work being done on streets and in workplaces. By the time something like, I don’t know, Brokeback Mountain arrives, the needle has already moved so far that a majority of people support gay rights. Cinema and politicians are always just behind the curve. And sometimes, it goes the other way. S Craig Zahler, I predict, is ahead of his time. I think, there will be many more of him in the coming years. I think our landscape of cinematic criticism, our audience goers, and our vaunted liberal elite are going to be powerless to stop it. I think they’re going to embrace it.

So the question remains, what are we going to do about it?

Destruction is easy. Calling for bans, picketing the theatres, blah blah blah. The popular, genuine left sees impedance as an effective way to bulwark reactionaries. In some cases, sure, but I also question the value of art, of parallel creation as a necessary element of holding back reactionary media from breaching the mainstream. Maybe the solution is to not wait until the film’s out and try to get it banned. Maybe the solution is to make your own damn movies, and make sure they’re better.

The landscape is stacked against us, obviously. Zahler has made three films. Boots Riley, for example, has made one. There aren’t a lot of Ken Loaches left, and there’s less money to go around. Cinema with moral value, or that holds itself to a moral standard, is difficult to make gracefully. Maybe the solution for socialist filmmakers is genre flicks with horror or giallo elements or something, I don’t know.

But I do know that there is going to be a reckoning for cinema in the coming years, as monopolized franchises grow stale, as fickle theatregoers get bored, and as more people latch onto Zahler and his future contemporaries while media redistributes itself into even more atomized, well funded niches. We as socialists of any stripe tend to put a focus on workplace organizing, of theory, of electoral power in some cases, environmental power in others, but we also tend to write off the immense amount of cultural power we are able to capture. When a film like Sorry to Bother You comes out, we hold it up, but never conceive of creating something ourselves. The culture, so to speak, informs the discourse that happens in our workplaces, that affects our view of material conditions, that affects our understanding and our vision of attainable power. Media is a valuable tool in creating explosive change, and an underutilized one.

Nothing gets in the way of class organizing, but the method by which we produce class consciousness has to change. Workplaces are ground zero, but the truth is, if media has replaced our social relationships to the degree so many theorists have articulated it has, perhaps the solution is to use media to bring us back together. Not news shows. Not theoretical analysis on YouTube, but pure narrative cinema. There’s maybe a handful of western sphere films in the canon of socialist filmmaking. Now is the time to add to it, because S. Craig Zahler is making masterful cinema, and he’s not going to stop .















