Brett Gregory interviews Professor Mike Wayne about his book ‘Marxism Goes to the Movies’

BG: Hi, my name’s Brett Gregory, and I’m an associate editor with the UK arts, culture, and politics website, Culture Matters. In the following interview with the esteemed academic author of Marxism Goes to the Movies, published by Routledge in 2020, we explore, amongst other things, Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark’s ‘immense accumulation of commodities’; Hollywood’s 90 year embargo against ordinary working people appearing on the silver screen; and the future of the UK’s film and media industries under Keir Starmer’s new Labour government.

Hi. What’s your name, where do you lecture, and what are your research specialisms?

MW: My name is Mike Wayne, and I am a Professor in Film and Media Studies at Brunel University. My disciplinary and research background is in film and media studies, but as an extension of Marxism, which is inherently interdisciplinary, I also research in Marxist philosophy and political theory. I am, for example, currently writing a book called Gramsci and the Struggle for Democratic Communism.

BG: You’ve already published Marxism and Media Studies: Key Concepts and Contemporary Trends in 2003, and co-authored Considering Class: Theory, Culture and the Media in the 21st Century with Deirdre O’Neill in 2017. So, in what specific ways is Marxism Goes to the Movies an extension of these works?

MW: Well, the book was actually a commission – Routledge approached me to write a book on Marxism for their ‘Goes to the Movies’ series – so the title, Marxism Goes To The Movies wrote itself. That said, the book continues the emphasis which Marxism and Media Studies had on placing film within a broader media ecology and, in turn, placing that media ecology within a social and historical context, as understood through the optic of Marxism. There has been a criticism that media studies has been very ‘media centric’; that is, isolating discussion of the media from those wider contexts, and this is also true of film studies which has been shaped by arts disciplines such as literature and philosophy, neither of which have historically been very attuned to social, economic, political questions in the ways that the social sciences have been, for example.

BG: That’s very true. Although I studied literature and literary theory at university, I magically found myself teaching film studies and, eventually, becoming a filmmaker. Anyway, in your book you discuss Marx’s argument that the 'immense accumulation of commodities' in Western capitalist societies conceal social and economic power relations. In turn, you quote Guy Debord's observation that we live in a society of 'bewitching spectacles'. Of all things, this reminded me of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, with Bruce Wayne as Batman who, similar to Tony Stark as Iron Man in 2008, is comprehensively a capitalist superhero with an immense accumulation of wealth, technology, weaponry, commodities, and power. From a Marxist perspective, how would you interpret this North American cycle of superhero genre movies?

MW: Well, what I think I would say is that the Marxist study of film has to critically assimilate the innovations that there have been in reading texts, especially from the 1960s onwards. And these tools can be combined with the absolutely key Marxist principle of contradiction. That has to be carried into our understanding of films and genres. So the superhero genre is quite contradictory. Our analysis has to be granular. There are differences between franchises, and differences between one film and another. Iron Man/Tony Stark is a rather more uncomplicated capitalist entrepreneur than Bruce Wayne/Batman in The Dark Knight Trilogy with its vision of a highly unequal Gotham City. There’s a great scene, which would never happen in Tony Stark’s world, in The Dark Knight Rises where Selina/Catwoman and Bruce Wayne are dancing at the ball – all the rich people are there of Gotham City – and after a bit of back and forth, she tells him that there is ‘a storm coming and that it is going to take down the gilded rich’. And the context in which she says these words, they’re clearly meant to carry some weight.

So the genre has also developed an explicitly critical take on the whole concept of American superheroes from The Watchmen to The Boys. You know, The Watchmen with its critique of Cold War anti-communism, and American foreign policy in Vietnam and so on. The Boys looks at what would happen to the superhero in the context of corporate capitalism. Now, I wouldn’t want to oversell these films as strongly oppositional, but there are contradictions and critical currents which Marxism has to be alive to.

BG: Well, yeah, Christopher Nolan has mentioned a few times in interviews that The Dark Knight Rises is a retelling of Charles Dickens’ novel, A Tale of Two Cities, which is set before and during the French Revolution. However, most of the early ‘uncomplicated’ superhero movies seem to explicitly avoid the so-called ‘crisis in capitalism’ which took place near the beginning of this century. That is to say, the economic banking crash in 2008, the subsequent austerity measures, the widespread redundancies, the increase in energy prices, the cost-of-living crisis, the increase in homelessness etc.

Only three mainstream US movies come to my mind which deal with this very real topic directly: Chandor’s Margin Call in 2011, Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street in 2014, and McKay’s The Big Short in 2015. None of these releases however had the political impact of anti-establishment films from the past such as Pakula’s All The President’s Men in 1976, or Stone’s JFK in 1991. If anything, the antagonists in these movies are portrayed sympathetically and, of course, were welcomed by the mainstream media as simply entertaining excursions into the glossy world of finance.

MW: There’s another example of a film explicitly addressing what finance capital did to people, and that is Assault on Wall Street, which I mention in the book. The critics didn’t like that film at all because they found its vision of a man gunning down city slickers distasteful; but, for popular audiences, this revenge fantasy was rather appreciated, judging by responses on Rotten Tomatoes. Now, you may be right that the number of films dealing directly with the crash was rather small but many, many films were touched by the anti-finance capital feelings unleashed by the crash. I do think that the Left has to be much more alive to these currents within popular culture, because it is a good way of diagnosing what is going on within popular consciousness.

There is anyway a very long tradition within Hollywood of suspicion about corporate America and, after the crash, that came to surface in many films. I analyse the contradictory limits of such films, as in the case of Money Monster in some detail in the book. One of my favourite films from this period is the heist movie/western Hell or High Water, a film absolutely brimming with class conflict and resentment against the banks. We do need to give audiences the credit to read films allegorically. That’s to say, they understand that this or that individual story is actually telling a larger parable about exploitation in contemporary society.

BG: You have great faith in humanity, Mike. What’s your view on the argument that Hollywood’s dominant mode of address allows a handful of mavericks who ‘make strange’ in Russian Formalist terms – like David Lynch, Harmony Korine, Lars von Trier, or Yorgos Lanthimos – to slip into the mainstream only to keep the left-wing intelligentsia subdued?

MW: I actually don’t think it makes sense to operate with such a dichotomy: Hollywood as a homogeneous blob of ideological pap and a few auteurs keeping the intelligentsia satisfied. If we have a look at the industrial organisation of ownership and you will see some interesting tensions. Hollywood was one of the first industries to undergo changes that were later called ‘post-Fordism’. The vertically integrated ownership structures were partially broken up by anti-trust law and cultural trends. So there was a proliferation of production outfits, on the one hand, while monopoly capital consolidated itself around the distribution and exhibition structures. Some of these production outfits are owned outright by the studios, others partially so or have deals with them. But this proliferation represents the fact that capital has been dependent on the ideas of the creative talent, while the creative talent, directors, stars, scriptwriters, but also set and costume designers, cinematographers, and so forth are dependent on capital for investment decisions.

There are all sorts of struggles and tensions for control going on, and this happens on an international basis as US monopoly capital plugs into national cultures all around the world using this post-Fordist structure. Now set that industrial structure in the context of crises and the need to speak to popular culture, popular concerns, and you have a situation where what is actually produced cannot simply be read off as the ‘expression’ of the needs and interests of monopoly capital. A film like Detroit cannot be understood in that model, or a film like Dark Waters. I could produce a very long list of such films.

BG: I’ve seen Dark Waters with Mark Ruffalo. It reminded me a lot of Erin Brockovich with Julia Roberts, which is also based on a true story. And in these movies both DuPont and Pacific Gas and Electric Company have to pay out relatively large financial settlements for their pollutive crimes but, ultimately, they get away with corporate manslaughter. I mean, both companies are still at large today in the real world. Which, I suppose, brings us to the little people, the perennial victims of such crimes: the working class, the farm workers, the precariats.

I found it extremely interesting in Marxism Goes to the Movies when you highlight that, five years after the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression, ‘the plebeian, proletarian image’ – its narratives, its suffering and even its very existence – was banished from the silver screen. I quote: ‘[M]arginalised, controlled and policed by an elaborate and comprehensive censorship system that corporate Hollywood applied to itself in order to stop attacks by conservative Catholic organisations on movie ‘immorality’’ by way of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1934.'

Has a similar censorship process been in operation in mainstream cinema over the first quarter of the 21^st century? Have the working class, their representation and voices, been effectively banned?

MW: Yes, the social portraiture of Hollywood films in general has been historically anything but proletarian. In fact, the documentary filmmaker, John Grierson, was quoting a study done on Hollywood films back in the 1940s about how there were hardly any people in this sample of over 100 films who did ordinary jobs. There were high society types, or criminals, or people doing personal services for the rich. That’s why Grierson pioneered the British documentary film, in order to show the important role of the working class in keeping society ticking over. There’s no comparable censorship to the Motion Picture Production Code today – the skews in how Hollywood looks at the world and what the world looks like are more the outcome of economic, class, cultural and political pressures.

So, on the one hand, we have to view what dominant cinema produces as complex and contradictory with a degree of differentiation. On the other hand, we have to appreciate a negative: what dominant cinema does not produce (or the occasional political films which it fails to distribute properly), and what a different political economy that would produce – an entirely different cultural landscape, populated by different people, different issues, different perspectives, a cinema with different goals, different historical stories etc. Instead of having one solitary British filmmaker charting the history of the working class, Ken Loach, this burden of representation would fall on the shoulders of dozens of filmmakers with many different approaches.

BG: I wholeheartedly agree. British working-classness has become so multi-faceted and contradictory over the past quarter of a century, particularly with regards to online behaviour and mediated self-representation, for example. We should support original filmmakers who are able to confidently dramatise and explore these new developments, these new differences, from new perspectives. Of course, while Ken Loach is quite rightly celebrated as our foremost director of the working class, his films don’t represent the British working class in its entirety. Gary Oldman’s Nil by Mouth, for instance, was pretty spot on when portraying the type of council estate I grew up in over the 1970s and 1980s.

In relation to this, you’d imagine Marxist film theorists and critics would focus more on low- or no-budget working-class British cinema rather than always being so drawn to analysing multi-million dollar North American blockbusters whose marketing budgets often far exceed their production budgets.

MW: It’s very important that we look at, study and promote film practices outside the dominant cinema. As a documentary filmmaker myself, I know how hard it is to get your films out there. I think there are academics who are doing that kind of work – the Radical Film Network, for example, is evidence of academic interest in other cinemas. But, yes, I take your point, academics generally are often absorbed in the pleasures of popular culture to the detriment of alternatives. We certainly need academics engaging in policy debates and making the case for public investment in arts and culture, including the public funding of film.

I have been on the London East and South East Culture and Leisure Industry Committee for the TUC for many years, and a small sub-group from there co-authored a policy discussion document called Making Culture Ours. This made the case for public funding to be increased, and for cultural production and consumption to be democratised. There’s a lot of work like that going on within the trade union movement, some of it supported by academic research. Ultimately though we need a political context more receptive to these arguments than we currently have.

BG: Precisely. Myself and Jon Baldwin from London Metropolitan University were invited by Mike Quille at Culture Matters to put together a response to the then Labour Party’s ‘Plan for the Arts, Culture and Creative Industries’ which was published in March 2024. It wasn’t as extensive as ‘Making Culture Ours’, of course, but a number of our critical observations and demands are similar. Bearing this ‘un-democratised’ structure of the film and media industries in mind, you cite Marx’s argument that ‘[t]he bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society'.

Isn't this exactly what’s occurring with the AI generated material which is swarming all over us right now? In turn, aren’t great swathes of creatives going to become redundant, marginalised, and probably forgotten, as a consequence?

MW: I spoke before about Capital having dependency on creative talent for ideas, but it may be that with AI capital can finally rid itself of this troubling problem. That would be a historic defeat for both cultural workers and humanity. I mean, think about it: to have our storytelling controlled by plagiarising software that is a non-living, non-sensuous thing. Certainly AI will, if not carefully regulated, destroy many middle-class jobs that have hitherto been protected from mechanisation. The Screenwriters Guild went on strike for five months in 2023 and the question of protecting themselves from AI was part of that. They in fact won a good victory – a reminder of what the good old fashioned strike weapon can do. But I suspect the Hollywood studios will try again to weaken the protections against AI in due course. Capital never sleeps.

BG: Finally, since Marxism could be described as ‘philosophy in action’, do you believe that the Labour government’s newly installed Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Lisa Nandy, will, in both political and practical terms, aim to rectify the London-centric, middle-class bias in the UK’s film and media industries, improving working-class access and employment progression as a consequence, particularly in the north of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales?

MW: I co-directed with Deirdre O’Neill a documentary film on this very topic called The Acting Class. Talking to young and established working-class actors, the film explores the issues you have highlighted. The short answer to your question is, I think, ‘No’. Starmer’s Labour is Blairism 2.0, but now operating in a context where the neoliberal economic model they are wedded to is completely broken – never having recovered from the 2008 crash. Let’s face it, the UK is pretty much shattered. I think the way the corporate water companies pump shit into our rivers and seas is the perfect metaphor for what rule under corporate power looks like. All our multiple and interconnected problems derive from a project that is distributing wealth upwards.  We can only address those problems, including wresting the British acting industry from the grip of a privileged privately educated elite, if that project is reversed. In the interregnum, I’m afraid all we are going to get is a continuation of the managed decline policy of UK elites while extractive capitalism continues on its not so merry way.

BG: And here I was thinking you had great faith in humanity! Well, to end of a more positive note: there are a lot of young adult filmmakers I know in Manchester in the UK who are fully aware that the system’s rigged, that our leaders are incompetent, corrupt or both, and that the future looks extremely bleak; however, they’re still finding elaborate ways to assemble a crew, secure equipment, source actors, and shoot films anyway. Maybe this is because the human spirit never sleeps either. Many thanks for your time, insights and patience, Mike. This has been a very thought-provoking interview.

Marxism Goes to the Movies, available now on the Routledge website, is a fantastic read and extremely stirring, especially with regards to its expansive and detailed approach to historical developments in Marxist politics, theory and practice. It is highly recommended.