The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Stories of revolution have long faced the struggle of delivering a message meant to agitate through a medium designed to satisfy and entertain.
This article contains spoilers for Game of Thrones, V for Vendetta, and Gladiator II.
“You will not be able to stay home, brother. You will not be able to plug in, turn on, and cop out.” So begins Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” which is as succinct an indictment as one can find of the problems with media’s depiction of rebellion. The song delivers an onslaught of cultural allusions that characterize media coverage of the Civil Rights Movement as just another facet of a consumerist society. Such media has sanitized and repackaged revolutionary ideas and images and sold them back to the public in a form that will placate them, that will keep them at home, plugged in and copped out, not a threat to the dominant system. “The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal, the revolution will not get rid of the nubs, the revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner,” Scott-Heron orates. Instead, he preaches the need for collective action in the real world to force change. “Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction will no longer be so damn relevant, and women will not care if Dick finally got down with Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day.”
Such a song makes clear the inherent challenges in depicting revolution in media. With media such a powerful societal force, its default aim ends up being propaganda for the status quo. Why agitate people to dismantle a system that has given you such enormous power? Of course, there are and always have been artists interested in attacking the status quo, but in artistic rebellion they always face a choice: reject the infrastructure of the dominant media empires or try to work within that infrastructure. Both paths have their costs.
Those who reject the mainstream altogether might produce some genuine revolutionary work, but its reach will be highly limited. Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s feminist film Riddles of the Sphinx, which attempts to dismantle the patriarchal conventions embedded deep in cinema’s traditional structures, is a groundbreaking work in itself, but its total rejection of the dominant cinematic language also makes it impenetrable for general audiences. Today the film is seen mostly in academic contexts. The other path, working within the dominant media system, carries the risks Scott-Heron warned against: that when a work engaging with an ongoing revolutionary movement is presented amongst Coca-Cola commercials and TikTok dances, The Revolution™ becomes just another product sold to us by the very consumerist machine we were supposed to be rebelling against.
It seems like an impossible challenge: is there a way to make true revolutionary art that will reach the masses without getting diluted into another opiate that keeps us out of the streets and staring at our screens? That will be the focus of this two-article series. This first part will explore the problems that have long plagued the cinema of revolution, and next week’s article will examine two more recent works – One Battle After Another and Andor – which make significant progress in tackling these issues.
In the past few decades, cinematic depictions of revolution have regularly succumbed to two pitfalls. One is more on the centrist side of revolutionary politics, the other on the more radical side, but both end up facing the same problem: portraying the revolution in such a simplistic good-evil binary that there is no opportunity to make any substantive revolutionary statement.
The first pitfall is an insistence on moral purity. Here we find in our media a requirement that any revolutionary must be of absolutely perfect moral character. They must never do anything to get their hands dirty, and even the slightest bit of moral uncertainty in their actions discredits the entire revolutionary movement. It’s the tired trope of “I agree with your cause, but not the way you’re fighting for it.” Probably the foremost example here is Black Panther, where Killmonger’s ideas of Black liberation were just a little too radical for the Disney corporation, and so the movie had to turn him into a revenge-obsessed terrorist and make him choke an old woman in one scene to remind the audience that he’s the bad guy.
A more disturbing instance of this demand for moral faultlessness is the end of Game of Thrones. Throughout the series Daenerys is the one character who expresses an explicit interest in imposing major reform on Westeros’ feudal monarchy, “breaking the wheel” as she terms it. But her crusade against slavers and tyrants causes her to occasionally be ruthless and vindictive, and in the eyes of the show this is enough to disqualify her from being a worthy revolutionary. When she makes her full tyrant-turn in the series’ endgame, the show paints it as inevitable that a person like Daenerys would sooner or later burn an entire city alive. The show decides instead that its resident tree dude is the best choice to become king, and once coronated Bran imposes hardly any social reforms and basically just tells everyone to chill out. A telling moment in the finale comes when one character proposes instituting democracy in Westeros and gets laughed out of the room. For a show whose ending was supposed to be at least somewhat hopeful, this is a rather pessimistic move.
In demanding that righteous rebels have no moral scruples whatsoever, these works block the possibility of discussing what an actual revolution might entail. There is no nuance to be had. Even when admitting deep problems in a society’s sociopolitical fabric that need to be addressed, the only figures such works can conjure are the humble, selfless rebel who doesn’t seek power and doesn’t want to ruin anyone’s day, and who is thus neither equipped to nor interested in substantively challenging existing structures, or the crazy radical who, while technically ideologically correct, would only make things worse by instituting their vision. With such an impoverished picture of rebellion, the actual futures these works imagine are hardly revolutionary. We can get in these stories at best temperate social change, but nothing that rocks the boat too much. Instead of dismantling the institutions that systematically oppress people, we get assurances that the world would be much better if we all could just get along.
The other major pitfall of revolutionary stories has been a glorification of revolutionary symbolism at the expense of depicting the intricacies an actual revolutionary movement. These stories do not have any fear of radical change. On the contrary, they are fully decked out in revolutionary spirit, ready to storm the Bastille. But for all these stories have in revolutionary enthusiasm, they lack in depth about how a revolution actually happens. They do not care about how revolutionary movements are organized, what strategies they use to pursue their goals. To these stories, all it takes is one well-placed symbolic gesture and suddenly the Glorious Revolution will erupt and good will triumph over evil.
In V for Vendetta, the entire revolution against an authoritarian regime is the result of one man with a Guy Fawkes mask becoming a symbol of rebellion through a speech and some well-placed bombs. Over the course of a single montage late in the film, the entirety of London erupts into riots against the government, and at the climax a mob all in Guy Fawkes masks watches the Houses of Parliament blow up to the triumphant music of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture,” and that is the end of the authoritarian government. In Les Miserables we jump from revolutionaries plotting in cafes straight to their barricading of Paris streets. We get big musical numbers about the spirit of revolution and freedom, but what we don’t get is much examination of the rebels’ actual political goals or how they have worked to build their movement. We get all the big rhetoric and aesthetics of revolution, but none of the pesky details.
In these stories, revolution takes on a mythic quality. It is something that happens spontaneously, not something that is carefully nurtured over a sustained period of time. The assumption of these stories seems to be that in any authoritarian society, the people are all naturally ready to take to the streets in rebellion. All it takes a few, or even one, brave individual(s) to become a symbol and call for revolution, and it will suddenly be like Paris in July 1789. And further, all it takes to win the revolution is a singular sweeping action, blowing up Parliament, or the Death Star, or beating the bad guy in a fistfight, and authoritarianism will vanish once and for all.
This kind of mythic storytelling is fine in isolation, and in fact it’s useful for writing drama, where it’s much easier to resolve conflict through a few key actions taken by a few key characters than a long, arduous movement that is built on on the collective action of thousands or millions. But for a story that wants to help effect real change, that wants to contribute to a real revolution, such myths are counterproductive. In proselytizing the idea of the Glorious Revolution, stories like these lead us to expect the rebellion to spring up suddenly at the calling of some messianic figure instead of encouraging us to organize with those around us and make a long, grueling push to gain progress bit by bit against oppression. They characterize revolution as a lightning bolt from the heavens held together by the power of friendship and songs of freedom rather than a movement built piece-by-piece from the ground up that requires careful planning and long-term commitment before it can finally reach the point where the population spills into the streets.
To see in sum what these pitfalls lead to an attempted revolutionary film looking like today, look at Gladiator II. The film’s setup gives us a version of Rome where tyrannical twin emperors have taken power and instilled corruption and vice back into the empire. Besides the detail of their sending the army off to fight unnecessary wars of colonization, the film leaves it vague what their corruption and oppression actually entails. Our protagonist Lucius finds his way back to Rome as a gladiator seeking revenge against the general who killed his wife. He hates the corruption of the city, but has no political aims of reforming it; even later in the film, when he discovers his royal heritage and becomes involved in plots to overthrow the emperors, he acts primarily out of interest for himself and those he cares about. Naturally, such an apolitical character makes the perfect revolutionary leader.
The film has another character, Macrinus, a former slave who has risen to wealth and plots revenge against the empire. Here, the film has an opportunity to examine an overlooked aspect of revolutions: in developing Macrinus’ relationship with the other revolutionaries who are more concerned with the health of the society as a whole, it could examine how people from different backgrounds with different values and different means of getting what they want can work together to achieve a common political goal. But the film instead does the opposite. Macrinus is too much of a scheming Machiavellian to be a real revolutionary, so instead the film makes him its main villain, a power-hungry sadist who would burn everything down if he got to rule over the ashes.
It is a single speech Lucius gives in the Colosseum denouncing the emperors that charges the people of Rome into riots. We never see the riots in any detail, of course, only from an extreme distance as part of establishing shots. For a revolution that is supposed to be about returning Rome to the people, we see precious little of its ordinary citizens. Finally, after various backstabbings and riots and seizures of power, the whole thing climaxes with a sword fight between Lucius and Macrinus. Lucius wins, and then gives a big speech to the soldiers of two armies, convincing them to join together and build a better Rome. There is nothing substantive in the speech, nothing that conveys any sort of political ideology. Just trite statements about it being time to stop the fighting and restoring the “dream of Rome.” This is what revolutionary cinema has come to: a film that would like to be a timely symbol of a society fighting against its own corruption and restoring justice, but it has little to say about how we ought to fight against that corruption and even less to say about what we ought to replace it with. All we have is the shallow image of a revolution, perfect to keep us sated by our screens, that goes great with Coke and can be followed by reruns of The Beverly Hillbillies.
Such are the challenges that revolutionary cinema has faced for a while. But not all hope is lost. For there are two recent works – Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film One Battle After Another and the Star Wars prequel Andor – which strive to meet these challenges, and in doing so represent significant progress towards a revolutionary cinema that can actually be helpful to our real-world struggles. Stay tuned for part two of this series, which should be up in a week or so, for an examination of what these works do differently.
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