Hollywood’s Moral Turn: Black Widow, Luca, and Nomadland

II HOLLYWOOD

THE VACUITY OF HOLLYWOOD’S MORAL TURN

Lately there have been many falsely progressive movies—ones that illustrate openness to immigrants, the predicament of the nomadic working class, feminine solidarity, etc. But these films deal with these topics in a “decaffeinated” way, blurring their critical edge.

Let’s take three movies as examples: Black Widow, Luca, and Nomadland. Black Widow is usually categorized as a meta-genre—Marvel superheroes-meet-Bourne or Bond—but a more pertinent characterization is a Marvel movie made during the #MeToo wave. How is this feminization inscribed into the texture of the film?

Black Widow is directed by a woman (Cate Shortland), and one can speculate that this accounts for some of the film’s #MeToo motifs. The emotional focus of the film is the relationship between Natasha (Scarlett Johansson) and Yelena (Florence Pugh), a sisterly couple engaged in a complex relationship of love and competition, care and suspicion. In a similar vein, the best episode of the film takes place in Budapest, in an ordinary apartment inside a house with crumbling facade.

In a prologue set twenty years earlier, we discover that Natasha and Yelena are not real sisters. In 1995, Russian super-soldier Alexei Shostakov and Black Widow Melina Vostokoff, both Russian undercover agents, posed as a family in Ohio with their surrogate daughters Natasha Romanoff and Yelena Belova. After finishing their mission, they escape back to Russia where General Dreykov (played by Ray Winstone) has Romanoff and Belova taken to the Red Room for training to become Black Widows: perfect killers whose minds are controlled. Even twenty years later, the two sisters long for a proper place in a nuclear family, despite both knowing that the nuclear family they were taken from was fake.

Liberation, for them, is not liberation from family ties, but liberation from the wired-brain program that controls them. In their attempt to regain freedom, the two heroines break their “natural” father out of prison so he can help them, but he is now an impotent, aged, and confused clown. One can argue that the key to the film is the two paternal figures: The father who was imposed on them as their “natural” parent is a weak clown, and his absence is filled by a figure who, instead of exerting symbolic authority over his “children,” controls their brains.

One should ask these simple questions: Why are all Dreykov’s agents women? And why was the Red Room’s chemical agent that enables Dreykov to control women’s minds developed by a woman (specifically Vostokoff, the heroines’ fake mother)? Does this not indicate that Dreykov, far from being simply an extreme representation of the male fantasy of the total domination over women, is instead a figure of feminine fantasy? This fantasy figure is weak and ineffective—which is why, although Winstone is usually excellent as an evil character, Dreykov somehow doesn’t catch on as a bad guy, and the last half hour of the film (the protracted battle against Dreykov) is flat and boring. It is at this point that the film turns wrong: In a time of weakened paternal authority, what prevents women’s full emancipation is not (yet) mind-control, but a set of social and ideological conditions. Dreykov as the ultimate enemy is a fetish, a ridiculous mask that obfuscates these conditions.

A similar obfuscation is easily detectable in Luca (Enrico Casarosa, 2021). Set on the Italian Riviera in the 1950s–1960s, the film centers on Luca Paguro, a sea monster boy with the ability to assume human form while on land. Luca explores the town of Portorosso with his new human best friend Alberto Scorfano and experiences a life-changing summer. The sea monster is obviously a metaphor for feeling different, from being LGBTQ+ to being an immigrant. This sounds nice, but it is ideology at its worst: In this universe, there are no antagonisms among sea monsters or humans, so all that is needed is trust, friendship, and tolerant understanding.

So what is wrong with Nomadland (Chloe Zhao, 2020), which seems to focus precisely on those excluded from the mainstream of our societies? In Germany and some other countries, a vague so-called “classism”—a class version of identity politics—is emerging. In this version of classism, workers are taught to safeguard and promote their socio-cultural practices and self-respect; they are made aware of the crucial role they play in social reproduction. Worker movements thus become another element in the chain of identities, like a particular race or sexual orientation.

Such a “solution” to the “workers’ problem” characterizes Fascism and populism as respectful to workers and able to admit that workers are often exploited, and they (usually sincerely) want to make workers’ position better within the coordinates of the existing system. Trump was doing this, too. He protected U.S. workers from banks and unfair Chinese competition.

Is Nomadland not the ultimate example of such classism? It portrays the daily lives of our “nomadic proletarians,” workers without a permanent home who live in trailers and wander around from one temporary job to another. They are shown as decent people, full of spontaneous goodness and solidarity with each other, inhabiting their own world of small customs and rituals, and enjoying their modest happiness. Even the occasional work in an Amazon packaging center goes quite well—that’s how our hegemonic ideology likes to see workers.

No wonder the movie was the big winner of the 2021 Oscars. Although the lives depicted are rather miserable, the movie bribes us into enjoying it with the charming details of a specific way of life. The movie’s tagline could have been: “Enjoy being a nomadic proletarian!”

It is precisely the refusal to be such an element in the chain of identities that defines the authentic workers movement. In India I met with the representatives of the lowest group of the lowest sub-caste of the Untouchables, the dry toilet cleaners. I asked them about the basic premise of their program and what they wanted. They instantly gave me an answer: “We don’t want to be ourselves, what we are.” Workers are, to quote French philosopher Jacques Rancière, a “part of no-part” of the social body, they lack a proper place in it—an antagonism embodied. Are we asking too much of Hollywood if we expect movies about lives that are a “part of no-part” of our societies?

Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite did it, Todd Phillips’ Joker did it, and it can be done again.