Movie Critic YouTube And Systems Of Control

Exploring the discussion on YouTube regarding a recent Star Wars series on authoritarianism

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For me, Christmas is a time to lounge around watching films and long-form video essays. I get the chance to nurse the odd hangover from too much Christmas cheer and take some time out, check in on what movies people are watching or discussing, and generally see where we are with the culture. After all, for a channel called ''Morgoth's Review'' there isn't actually much reviewing or even engagement with pop culture.

The YouTube discourse on movies is dominated by the epic takedown video essay, and given the sad state of films and TV shows these days, that's understandable and also a political bellwether. Everything has been politicized, all media has become a camel loaded up with the politics and ideology of Global Finance and ''Woke''. It infests everything like an ooze, it infuriates people and bores people, but tearing down a franchise covered in it can also make for good entertainment in and of itself. At the same time, I just don't care anymore, I can't bring myself to watch Amazon's butchering of Tolkien, I've never been interested in the Marvel capeshit stuff and I don't have any streaming services or even a means to watch it all.

Nevertheless, I dropped in on movie critic and movie essay YouTube to see what the latest buzz was and I was surprised to see so much discussion around an obscure Star Wars series called ''Andor''. Again, I realized just how out of touch I've become with pop culture. Once upon a time as a young man I'd have been counting down the days to a Star Wars release but now, well, who cares. Whole sagas come and go and it doesn't matter because like so many other fictional forms it's been reduced to nothing more than content. The Andor thing though, seemed to have touched a sweet spot. Now, don't worry I'm well aware most of my audience haven't watched it either. To be brief, Andor presents a more realistic Star Wars universe, it's mildly less woke, it's gritty, and looks like Middlesborough in the '80s, both the cast and setting seem to be inspired by the 2019 series Chernobyl. Andor is an unromantic portrayal of life under a totalitarian system, the Empire's system.

While Andor itself was decent enough, a sort of Brutalist council estate far far away, what interested me was the discussion on YouTube, not so much from movie critic YouTube who mainly gave it a pass. But from the Big Brained more left-leaning video essayists, who correctly, viewed it as an ode to the Marxist Revolutionary spirit. Or, conversely, a long meditation on Anti-Fascism. The Empire was a Fascist Empire. The writer of the show admitted that the main character was based on a young Joseph Stalin and that the conditions that the Empire had created were similar to that preceding both the French and Russian Revolutions. There's even one character who waxes poetic about idealism and he's written it all out in a manifesto, just so you get the point.

There's no mysticism or light sabers or Jedi here, there's a vast bureaucracy of careerists and managers embodying the banality of evil. And sure enough, leftist video essayists rolled out Hannah Arendt quotes and Berthold Brecht lines and splattered them in the thumbnails of their videos. Totalitarianism, Fascism, and authoritarianism, you see, are bad, very bad.

All of this raises a few questions, more than a few actually. But if what is depicted on the screen represents the pre-revolutionary phase in the fight against oppression, why does it look more like the regime which came in after the revolution than Ztarist Russia? Complete with Gulags, Brutalist buildings, and secret intelligence agencies spying on the masses.

And so what we're dealing with here is less a Star Wars drama, and more a depiction of a totalitarian system and how people within the western discourse, culturally and politically, internalize and process witnessing such a system. It's ironic that progressives are only able to look back, when conceptualizing such a dystopia, and this goes for the screenwriters as well as YouTube content creators. Fascism is simply the system capitalism will fall back on when in its death throes or facing impending collapse. Totalitarianism and authoritarianism are not something the left has to confront in the here and now, and so when trying to understand it they return to the 1930s, always like they're trapped within a cosmic loop.

Yet regardless of the Marxism, from Disney the multibillion-dollar corporation let's not forget, a lot of what is in Andor resonated with me too, and not in terms of comparing it to Stalinism, or anything from that era, but in here and now. There are those who support the empire, those who work for the empire, those who shuffle along just trying to get by, the vast majority, and those who are actively opposed to the empire.

People speak to each other in code knowing that a slight slip-up can be disastrous. They hide their identities and cover their tracks, making sure you can plausibly deny any assertions that you're thinking or behaving in a way that will annoy the empire.

Those who actively oppose the empire are united in that, but not much more. There are idealists dreaming of a better system to live under, there are anarchists who just want to watch it all crumble, there are people advocating that the struggle is futile and that running off to some forgotten corner is the best option, and still others, cynics, who just try to profit from the system and looking out for themself. The intelligence agencies of the empire are not too panicked by a lone individual howling on a street corner but are highly efficient and capable when the merest hint of a network of resistance begins to form.

You then come to the class of people who're potentially the most serious threat to Power in such a tyranny, the independently wealthy. Or as the Marxists would say the bourgeoisie. They, more than any other group, fear the knock on the door the most because they also have the most to lose. On the other hand, they also have the most to give in terms of funding and resources, and the empire knows it. Thus we learn that new legislation is being passed so that bank transfers and allocation of credits can more easily be tracked by the Imperial bureaucracy.

Doesn't this all sound vaguely familiar?

It's at this point that I'd like to go off a tangent before we proceed in order that we might better nail down the nature of the system which we have in the west, and most certainly in Britain. There's a conspiracy theory that has been going around for about a year in Britain that the supposed asylum seekers coming across the channel are actually a secret UN army who, at some future point, will cast aside their shell suits and leather jackets and don full military uniform and enforce martial law across Britain, for whatever reason. The reason I find this conspiracy theory to be wrong is that it misunderstands the nature of control in Britain. It assumes that control of the populace relies on hard power, thus before Britain descends fully into a police state it will need a new army of some sort, not bound to the population.

This is to misunderstand that the most efficient form of control deployed in the west today is not hard power, troops on the streets, but soft power, and in particular the panopticon. Jeremy Bentham's panopticon is an efficient form of control because the prisoner never knows if he's being watched or not and as a consequence of not knowing moderates his behavior on the assumption that he is always being watched. In Britain, we operate on the assumption that we're being watched and we by now know what happens if you step out of line. In actual fact, the technological panopticon we have today is far, far more pervasive and insidious than the Victorian prison scenario. A year ago, due to the content I was making relating to the pandemic, I was suddenly banned from Patreon losing a lot of my online income. I don't who, or why, or for what, the point is, I was being watched and I ''stepped out of line''.

In Andor this amounts to being zapped by the electric grid in the prison, but the point is made regardless. The real threat is not the stormtroopers, the star destroyers, or the mystical Sith lords and their light sabers. No, it's the bureaucrats, it's the managers and the bankers, the little cogs in the machine who listen to your calls and monitor your emails. It's the legislators and the policymakers and the minions who enforce the laws and thoughtlessly parrot what Power told them and view these diktats as objective moral goods.

It is the vindictive careerist at the HR DPT trying to trip you up and insisting you adhere to absurdities or malicious individuals who know they can destroy you if you do not get the pronouns right. The kneeling policemen, the torn down statues and the covered-up crimes and rapes, the crime rates and the open borders, the willful refusal to adhere to the public will, and the demonization of the sentiment behind that will. It is the complete and total inversion of traditional norms, never asked for always dictated from on high by ruthless, but dead-souled maniacs thinking only of themselves and their own ambition.

We are told though, if you aren't doing anything wrong then you have nothing to hide. A line repeated in Andor. The issue is, I have no control over what the system decides is right or wrong, we just have to keep up with the latest current thing and not get left behind in terms of our values system the next time it is randomly updated.

The problem with so much of the analysis is of course the ability of so many left-leaning YouTube video essayists to deconstruct totalitarian systems while not acknowledging that they themselves are very often the banality that evil uses as a conduit.

Consider the Youtuber ''Just Write''. He's thoughtful and well-read and I've enjoyed many a video from him. Yet in his video essay on Andor he managed to get in a few swipes at other YouTubers who complain about politics in movies these days. In his view, this was just people needlessly moaning about feminism, or diversity. In other words, he's turning a blind eye to what is in both policy and effect, top-down social engineering. This is why movie critic YouTube who usually rails against woke agenda in movies identified with Andor, it may be a bit much to say they're oppressed, but they and many other people do indeed feel as if they're living under a deeply pernicious and overpowering technocratic system which does not have their interests at heart, to put it mildly.

The trick of so many progressive content creators is to always focus on the totalitarianism of yore and trivialize the emerging tyranny of the present. As noted above, there aren't stormtroopers marching down the streets, but there's more than one way to terrorize a population.

You'll notice the subtle way Just Write has camouflaged the word ''fascism'' in the title of his video. Even though the sentiment of both the title and the video is clearly not supportive of that ideology. But he's aware, as are we all, that Google has created an incentive structure that will reward certain subjects and punish others, and he doesn't want to be punished by having his ads removed or video de-boosted.

In other words, he's playing by the rules of the panopticon, or system of control that exists on the platform. In a small way, he's adapting his content to adhere to what Power wants. In this instance, it hardly even matters, but the question is, where is the line? The system also wants to promote feminism and various other politically correct agendas via its media, and Disney is a large node in a network of media that has a message it wants the masses to absorb. He seems fine with that too.

This is a problem for progressive video essayists analyzing structures of power and control in our current age because they are not outside of a system of control themselves and so need to be asking themselves about the degree to which their worldview is merely adhering to Power.

Or, to put it another way, how do they know they aren't the bad guys?

My favourite character in Andor is Dedra Meero, the very embodiment of the career-obsessed single white woman. But what's great about her character is that she does not see herself as evil, she absolutely believes in the Imperial project and works tirelessly to uphold its values and dominance. She isn't a cackling sorcerer or a witch, she's a bureaucrat. Which is to say, she is the banality of evil incarnate.

It is the Dedra's of this world who cut people off from their bank accounts and place question marks against people's names in files. It's the Dedra's who carefully sift through data sheets inspecting compliance and malleability in populations.

This is how we live now, and it's getting exponentially worse year after year. Of course, this all depends on where you stand in relation to the wants and whims of Power. If you're compliant then you're ok, if you're thinking critically ... too bad for you. Or as we are told, there will be consequences for your speech.

What's bizarre about this slow and steady slide into totalitarianism in the west is that western culture is awash with imagery of dystopic regimes. To deploy a term such as ''Orwellian'' is now seen as a cliche, yet we continue to slide toward 1984, or a Brave New World. We are not strangers to visions of authoritarian control, censorship, the banality of evil, and brainwashing, yet all are now done right out in the open and even as a matter of policy. But we tell ourselves, or at least some do, that it could never happen here precisely because we're bombarded all our lives with how bad it could be.

There's an interesting scene in Andor where the well-off bourgeoisie discuss whether or not the new sweeping powers that the Empire has granted itself are a step too far. One secret member of the resistance slips the question in, while another says he's fine with it as long as the quality of wine remains high. Others point out that if you've done nothing wrong, there's nothing to worry about.

There are so many signs now that something is deeply wrong with the west, whether it's the complete lack of democratic accountability or the disregard and demonization of the public will. The ever-changing social values, always top-down, corruption, and the insidious ''public-private partnerships'' which weren't voted for or wanted. The system still calls itself a Liberal Democracy when it's neither liberal nor democratic. It's like we're being terraformed into something else.

And all of this happens to a cultural backdrop that is saturated in dark visions of authoritarian regimes. I suppose the line between a warning and predictive programming is thinner than I thought. The fiction and the reality seem to complement each other, though perhaps the greatest trick has been to convince the bureaucrats and petty tyrants of our reality, that they’re the free-thinking revolutionaries.

Are we in Britain today actually ‘‘free’’ I find the idea laughable, in a political sense, we simply aren’t. But here the left-liberal side of the political theatre would demand to know what we think we’re not free to do and scoff that we should not be bad people. It isn’t a political question but a moral one. Even though what gets so many people in trouble, and letters from the police are using the wrong speech or terminology in relation to the groups the equalities act refers to as ‘‘protected’’. In De Jouvenelian terms, they’re the client groups of Power.

And so it isn’t a moral issue, it’s a Power-political one.

Going into 2023 what I and so many others want from the liberal progressive is, well, honesty, it is for them to take ownership of what they are and what they represent. To look in the mirror and see the reality, that they represent not revolutionaries, but janisseries and managers and narrative enforcers of an empire.

To overcome the cognitive dissonance of seeing fictional depictions of authoritarian regimes and dystopias and then identifying with the resistance and not the Power. Or worse still, to be the one who turns away because the wine tastes sweet and why rock the boat? And here once more the question needs to be asked of left-leaning intellectuals, do you genuinely believe in the positions you hold, or do you believe what power wants you to believe?

Or as Clarice Starling asked of Hannibal Lector ‘‘Why don’t you point that high-powered perception at yourself? Or maybe you’re afraid to’’.