Entertainmentculture & trends
Why Politics Is Ruining How We Watch Movies
Paul Thomas Anderson’s *One Battle After Another* arrived in late 2025 as a cinematic Molotov cocktail, its imagery of revolutionaries clashing with a militarized, white-supremacist state feeling ripped from the headlines. Yet, in a telling interview with the Los Angeles Times, Anderson demurred, insisting the biggest mistake he could make was to put politics up front.Adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel *Vineland* and conceived decades prior, the film was, in his view, a character study on the timeless nature of fascism, not a manifesto for the Trump era. This disconnect between artist intent and audience reception is the central fissure in how we consume film today.A growing, voracious expectation for movies to deliver straightforward, instructive political takeaways is flattening the art form into mere content for the culture war, a trend that speaks less to the power of cinema and more to the poverty of our current discourse. Online, debates persist over whether Anderson’s epic is ‘radical enough,’ while this year’s *Superman* blockbuster was parsed as an anti-Zionist allegary—a reading director James Gunn denied—and the long-running musical *Wicked* was suddenly narrowed into a TikTok critique of white feminism.Conversely, films like *After the Hunt*, which tackles a campus sexual assault allegation, faced criticism for not being direct enough in its #MeToo commentary. As film critic Jourdain Searles observes, we’ve become obsessed with categorizing films as morally good or bad to neatly insert them into political discourse, treating them not as complex narratives but as ‘message delivery machines.’ This reductive lens is partly a symptom of a barren landscape. Where Hollywood once thrived on explicit political cinema—from the countercultural surges of the 60s and 70s, to the Nixon-era paranoia of *All the President’s Men* and *The Parallax View*, to the inside-the-Beltway dramas of the 90s like *The American President*—the genre has dwindled under the threat of the second Trump administration.Projects like the Trump biopic *The Apprentice* faced distribution blacklisting after legal threats, and the satirical *The Hunt* was pulled from theatrical release following a presidential tweet. Studio cowardice, as Searles notes, has made direct political work implicating the right’s bigotry or systemic failure a perilous gamble.In the absence of films that directly challenge power, audiences project their desires onto whatever is available, seeking a cathartic challenge to the status quo even where none was intended. This hunt for subtext is far more extreme and performative on the political right, where pundits like Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson label everything from *The Super Mario Bros.
#politics in film
#movie criticism
#culture wars
#Paul Thomas Anderson
#Superman
#Wicked
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