Accumulation and Enjoyment on Mulholland Drive

Hollywood contra capitalism

When Hollywood addresses itself explicitly to the critique of capitalism, the results are often baleful. Rather than exploring either the inherent contradictions of the capitalist system or its psychic costs, films tend to provide either mystifying analyses or anodyne solutions. One need look no further than The Company Men (John Wells, 2011) or Larry Crowne (Tom Hanks, 2011), two responses to the 2008 economic crisis, to find lamentable confirmations of this maxim. The Company Men preaches an earlier version of capitalism as the solution to the contemporary crisis and Larry Crowne advocates going to a community college for worker retraining. These liberal remedies to a crisis within capitalism appear less noxious than the austerity measures proposed and enacted by conservative governments around the world, but they in no way present a serious response to the failures of the capitalist mode of production.

The spate of documentaries probing the economic collapse confronts these failures more directly. They take up an entirely critical attitude toward the immorality prominent among those arch-capitalists who created the crisis. The most famous of these documentaries is Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job (2010). Ferguson shows how many bankers on Wall Street both precipitated the failure and profited immensely from it. The film makes clear that the financial crisis was not an accident or necessity of the capitalist mode of production but an act of volition on the part of savvy investors out to make as much money as possible. Here, there is no papering over the economic causes or the personal devastation of the crisis, as in The Company Men or Larry Crowne. Instead, Inside Job is a full-throated indictment of capitalism.

And yet, this type of film does not go far enough and cedes far too much terrain to the object of its critique. Despite its radical tone and highly critical edge, Inside Job never takes aim at the proper target. It envisions the economic crisis as the doing of a few bad apples within the capitalist system rather than as the inevitable result of the system itself. It enacts a moral rather than a political indictment. This tendency to take up a moral rather than a political position infects many documentary exposés, including those of Michael Moore, that otherwise provides an incisive critique of the contemporary capitalist economy.¹

But even films that remain on an economic terrain rather than slipping onto a moral one in their critique of capitalism still come up lacking in their indictment. The masterpieces depicting the disastrous effects of capitalism or its inherent corruption, like Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941) or Glengarry Glen Ross (James Foley, 1992), fail to question how capitalism betrays its adherents. Though Sullivan’s Travels and Glengarry Glen Ross both show people destroyed by capitalism, neither is able to translate this depiction of destruction into a critique of the system’s basic premises. In Hollywood’s critical vision, capitalism produces inequality and corruption, but the cinematic critique never touches on the precise logic of enjoyment that subtends the capitalist system. By leaving capitalism’s logic of enjoyment intact, direct filmic critiques, even those coming from outside Hollywood like John Sayles’s Matewan (1987) or Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses (2000), enable spectators to continue to adhere to the fundamental structure of capitalism while wanting to see it tweaked on the edges. Capitalism isn’t working in these films, but its failure doesn’t stem from a fundamental error in understanding how we enjoy. The key to an effective critique of capitalism lies in the ability to expose this error and make evident that capitalism represents a barrier to our enjoyment, even for those who succeed. Unless cinema lays bare this fundamental error, its critique will remain within the orbit of what it attempts to critique rather than escaping it.

Marx does not believe in the power of ideas or representations to challenge the dominance of capitalism. But he does admit that correctly apprehending the structure of capitalism can give material action a helping hand, though it can only do so if it thinks through capitalism in its...