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tkahn6 | 12 years ago
Example: Safe House where eventually the audience is shown that the reason Denzel Washington's character defects and turns on the CIA is because the CIA was doing clearly immoral things.
I know this narrative is attractive because it makes 'the masses' out to be sheep with you as the one that can see through it all, but it's the height of arrogance and you happen to be wrong.
AnthonyMouse|12 years ago
The problem is that it's still oversimplifying. In movies like that the government agents become the wooden bad guys who can do no right, and then the general rule is that by the end of the movie they'll either be killed or arrested and everything will be right with the world once again.
In reality the world is not so black and white. Government agents invading privacy or otherwise breaking the law can have led long and distinguished careers and have caught legitimate bad guys. They may or not be corrupt or have illegitimate motives -- no doubt there are government officials who sincerely believe that dragnet surveillance is a good thing. You can have normal people who do bad things for good reasons, and it's still wrong and has to be stopped.
The Dark Knight kind of exemplifies the problem. Even when they're trying to give a justifiable treatment to the surveillance issue, at the end of the day the hero builds and uses the unreasonably invasive tools to save the day and is never brought to account for it by anyone. Because it allows them to be mealy mouthed pandering marketing trolls: The gung ho surveillance advocates get to see their arguments justified in fiction because the surveillance is necessary for the good guys to win while the anti-surveillance crowd gets to see the machine destroyed at the end. So Hollywood gets to avoid alienating any of the viewers by taking any kind of a real stand rather than making the hero face the hard choice and then do the right thing and catch the bad guys the right way instead of breaking the rules for expediency.
tkahn6|12 years ago
Except that no one knows about it besides he and Fox, so how can he be brought to account for it by anyone?
Except that he tells Fox to destroy it precisely because it is so powerful and invasive.
> The problem is that it's still oversimplifying.
Except that in the exact movie I gave as an example, in the end the CIA explicitly is shown to be covering up the events of the movie and it is indicated that they will continue to do immoral things.
See my original comment about the reason why you find this theory so attractive.
stephengillie|12 years ago