Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.The 1954 animated adaptation of Animal Farm is famous not because of its high quality but because one of the major forces in bringing it to screen was the CIA. As Frances Stonor Saunders details in The Cultural Cold War, the CIA bought the movie rights from George Orwell’s widow, was a significant backer of the film’s production and was even instrumental in changing the ending so it no longer portrayed Soviet Communism (the mutinous pigs) and the ousted humans (western capitalism) as equally bad.What the CIA recognised is that mass market entertainment matters, and that when the entertainment is family friendly it matters all the more. (Regrettably, it doesn’t seem to have recognised that so too does quality.) Today the values that the Marvel movies espouse, both by accident and design, tell us a great deal about the society that produces them and what it stands for, or against. That Disney, Marvel’s parent company, has gone through a period in which it has been relatively timid on cultural and political issues, turning with whatever wind it thinks is favourable, makes it even more useful a gauge of where polite opinion is. The latest in the series, Captain America: Brave New World, is not, I would say, appointment viewing. But it is striking because it is a film that wants to be about deep political issues — but is constrained. You can see that this was a film that once had something to say about Donald Trump, albeit in a ham-fisted and allegorical way. (When it was announced, Republican donors were still all in on Ron DeSantis.) What has made it to air is a film that asks: “What makes a president bad?” and answers: “Having a kooky nickname.” As one character comments: “We’re talking about Thaddeus ‘Thunderbolt’ Ross. Son of a bitch earned that nickname.” Quite how one “earns” the nickname “Thunderbolt” is unclear to me — only turn up in bad weather? Loudly announce your own arrival? And why this nickname is, in and of itself, a damning indictment of a politician is never revealed either. Unlike the comic book Ross, who turns into a monster deliberately, this one does so through being poisoned, another plot chance that makes its monstrous president rather more sympathetic than we might have expected.We will all be long dead before an independent historian is allowed into Disney’s vaults to work out what really went wrong with this film, which bears the heavy scars of corrective surgery in the edit suite. I would bet my life that in one scene neither actor was in the studio and that both were painted into a third location in order to facilitate the repair job. The studio admits there were extensive reshoots and it seems pretty obvious to me that there is, somewhere, a Kamala Harris edit of Brave New World, though I can’t in all honesty say that it would be any better. But what has ended up on screen is a film that doesn’t want to say anything about its subject matter. The president is clearly meant to be something of a wrong ’un. But at some point between the movie’s conception and its arrival in cinemas, someone at Disney has realised that they don’t want to set out what, exactly, it means to be a bad president. What plot lines and values Disney puts on air have always told us something, in part because the company has, in recent decades, rarely been brave. This is a studio that puts a gay kiss on screen in Star Wars, but in a way that is “blink and you’ll miss it” in order not to jeopardise sales in places where homosexuality is forbidden. (That timidity may be why the role of the rival nation in the Indian Ocean in Brave New World is played not by China but, somewhat incongruously, by Japan.) It matters too because what Disney values shapes what we see as society. Just as it mattered as a symbol of what studios might be willing to pander to overseas when Warner Bros’ Barbie movie contained a map that appeared to endorse China’s claim to Taiwan, the fact Captain America cannot even muster a token judgment about what might make a president “bad” tells us something about what Disney will bend to at home.The truisms about the value of elections and global co-operation have become too hot to touch for many in the US. It is a reminder that in Trump’s brave new world, one way that life will change is not just in what the American state does not do to defend democracy abroad, but in what values US culture no longer celebrates. Perhaps in the 2032 remake of Animal Farm, the pigs will be the heroes. [email protected]
