We Are Turning Everything Into Allegory

About a year ago, Alex Garland’s Civil War released and provoked an interesting reaction. The film depicts a speculative near future where the United States is ravaged by a second civil war, a future that, given the predicament in the real United States, does not seem quite as speculative as it probably ought to. The film is very cagy in its worldbuilding; it does not detail what spurred the war or what the ideological and political lines it is being fought on are. Such shrouded context was what largely sparked the controversy around the film, as many viewers felt frustrated at the film’s apoliticism, marking it as the film chickening out of actually saying anything. But this apoliticism was a very intentional choice. One of the few bits of exposition we are given about the war is that the rebel “Western forces” are led by Texas and California, in our America the largest red and blue states respectively. Putting these two states together into a single faction is a move to prevent the viewers’ political affiliations from coloring their perception of this film’s conflict. It is not so easy to label one side as the liberals, the other the conservatives, and from your own political preference decide then who the good guys are. Even more telling is a scene where our main characters encounter a couple soldiers hiding out from a sniper in a nearby building. One of our reporters, Joel, asks the soldiers who’s in the building. A soldier responds curtly that it’s someone trying to kill them. When Joel presses for more details, specifically who they’re fighting for, they rebuke him. The film is telling us how to watch it. It’s challenging us to disconnect from our own political fervor and see the war just as a war, not as one righteous side against another tyrannical side, but as people killing each other. Judging by the reactions to the film, it’s a challenge that many failed, as they instead sought ways to make the film fit into their own political views.

What Civil War exposed was a growing phenomenon in our approach to media: the trend towards reading everything as a direct commentary about the state of the world right now. There is less and less room for stories just for the sake of stories, for art to have its own musings about the topics of its choosing. Art now has to be relevant to the present moment, it is supposed to have something to say about where we are right now. And if the work doesn’t immediately offer itself up as a topical commentary, then we will wrangle it into one. Our prevailing strategy in interpreting media is to turn everything into an allegory. In doing so, we are reversing the usual relationship between culture and the art it produces. Generally, art emerges from the zeitgeist, blooming from its prevalent ideas, styles, and values. But now we are seeing a strangulation of art by the zeitgeist. The cultural moment is not a source of art so much as a standard to which art is forced assimilate.

As an example, a lot of media releasing nowadays seems to be invoking Donald Trump. In the currently airing Marvel series Daredevil: Born Again, convicted serial felon Wilson Fisk is elected mayor of New York on the back of a base that supports him more for his peculiar brand of masculine energy than his actual politics. In Bong Joon-ho’s sci-fi film Mickey 17, the villain, played by Mark Ruffalo, is a self-absorbed and idiotic politician who likewise commands a cult of personality, and at the midpoint of the film survives an attempted assassination with the bullet grazing him. The prestige drama Conclave, released in the heat of the U.S. presidential election, focuses on the election of another world leader, the Pope, with the choice between continuing the progressivism of the previous Pope or choosing one who preaches a return to traditional values as a thin veil for rampant racism and xenophobia. In each case, the connection to recent U.S. politics is hard to miss. But all of these works were developed long before the 2024 election, so they would have had to be quite prescient to have intentionally created these parallels. Yet the parallels are there. So what is going on?

In truth, nothing. Nothing out of the ordinary is going on. There is no great wave of Trump surrogates being inserted into our media. We are just far more primed to recognize any potential connections that might be there. Human perception is not some neutral intake of all the information around us, it is deeply selective. In order to process anything meaningfully, we need to choose what to focus on and screen out the rest. This screening is heavily guided by our prior emotions and mental states. When you are afraid, you notice more keenly all the potential threats around you. When you are embarrassed, every glance someone throws your way becomes magnified into a piercing stare. And when your country is run by a felonious egomaniacal racist, any vaguely similar characters in any movie you watch will stand out more than they otherwise would.

In principle, there is nothing wrong with such a phenomenon in our media consumption. Art is and always has been an exchange of perspectives between artist and audience. The artist observes what is happening in the world around them and distills some aspect of it into their work, the audience brings their own perspective to the work and gleans whatever seems to them most pertinent. This is usually a healthy dynamic. Having a work move through different cultural moments and thus be interpreted under different contexts helps keep it live and interesting, prevents it from falling into stagnancy as new ways of understanding it emerge. Works can gain new relevance as the zeitgeist swings back around and aligns with it – this has happened to films like A Face in the Crowd and Cabaret as they have turned out to be poignant predictors of the last decade of American politics. In general, an audience reading a work of art through the lens of their current culture is a good thing.

But there is an imbalance in how this occurs today. Instead of investigating how our media might apply to our current issues, we have begun demanding that they address them directly. We need to know which current politician Denzel Washington’s character in Gladiator II is supposed to be, what The Brutalist’s exact position on Zionism is, which side in Civil War is the Republicans. Rather than considering in good faith what a film is actually offering us, we try to prune and contort it to fit the schema we already see the world through. Then we can extract its conclusion and determine whether we agree or disagree with the film, whether it is problematic or unproblematic. We either use art to confirm our preexisting positions or reject it for being opposed or irrelevant to them. There is no actual discourse occurring.