White Squall, The Matrix, Alice in Wonderland, The Godfather 3, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Hunt for Red October... We explore how QAnon's obsession with movies can be explained by philosopher Theodor Adorno's theory on the commodification of popular culture and right wing propaganda.
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QAA's Website: https://qanonanonymous.com
Written by Liv Agar. Music by NAP. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 217 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, The Pop Culture and QAnon, How Movies Make Us Reactionary episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Liv Aker, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
What do movies like White Squall, The Matrix, Alice in Wonderland, Godfather 3, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and The Hunt for Red October all have in common?
Well, if you're normal, you might say, not that much.
They've all been made into regular old blockbuster films.
But if your brain is broken in the same type of way that ours are, you might recognize these films as important staples of the QAnon canon.
Even if you didn't put that together, you'd surely recognize the references that Q has taken from these films.
The rallying cry, where we go one, we go all.
The nefariously constructed substance, adrenochrome.
The rabbit hole that every pilled person eventually tumbles down into.
These, and many more, are all pulled from movies.
Not only this, but Q seems adamant that Trump's war against the cabal will play out just like a movie.
On multiple occasions, Q will say things like, Coincidence?
Everything shown has meaning.
You're watching a scripted movie.
It's as if Trump is a secret spy attempting to defeat a comically evil Hollywood-style villain.
Q seems to want anons to immerse themselves in the story as if it's unfolding on the big screen.
Is this a coincidence?
Or do Q's continual references to movies bear any weight on the connection between susceptibility for far-right propaganda and popular culture?
Sit back, grab some popcorn, and enjoy today's show as I run through the potential connection between right-wing propaganda and popular culture to understand what the hell is going on in QAnon's obsession with movies.
Hell yes.
This one's gonna get a little theoretical, and it's also important to note, just early on, I'm not shaming people who watch movies.
I watch movies all the time.
Yeah.
We're all sort of stuck in this, and we have to deal with the consequences.
Yeah, we're in this soup.
Why do I feel personally attacked somehow?
Just the premise of this episode.
I'm in a big hot tub with Jake and some soup.
We're just swimming around in the soup of culture together, and under the surface, anything could be happening.
It's 4 AM.
I'm getting my phone wet trying to show Julian YouTube videos.
I'm connecting to his Bluetooth speaker.
I'm playing him what I want to listen to.
I'm sucking him off in a grandiose fashion.
Julian drowned trying to suck me off underwater.
He's dead and that's how we planned it.
Never planned for the breathing.
Now to start, I want to begin in what you might think is an unexpected location.
It's 1933, following Hitler's rise to power in Germany and the consolidation of a one-party Nazi state.
While the German people were certainly used to life in a chronically unstable democracy, for most, the Nazi consolidation of power was far from the expected result.
This includes Theodor Adorno, a Jewish-German intellectual working within the Institute for Social Research, commonly referred to as the Frankfurt School, who understandably reacted to the Nazi takeover with horror.
While Adorno would later flee Germany and come up with the theory about popular culture I'll be discussing today, for the first few months of the Nazi takeover, he was completely paralyzed.
He saw swastikas hung and paraded across the streets, public rituals celebrating Hitler's victory, mass loyalty oaths taken to the new Nazi party, book burnings, and a tumultuous rage fueled by antisemitism.
The police raided the Frankfurt School's offices soon after, followed by Adorno's own personal home.
He would then be denied the ability to hold a teaching position on the grounds of being non-Aryan.
The writing was on the wall for many individuals in this new Germany who had suddenly become enemies of the state, such as public dissidents, communists, and Jews.
It was clear they needed to get out while they could.
And despite Adorno fitting multiple of these categories, himself a communist and a Jew, he procrastinated his leave of the country.
While he was able to conceive of the Nazi takeover, connected to the general social and cultural decline produced by late-stage capitalism, And to communists in the 30s, they did think of it as the latest possible stage of capitalism.
He could not conceive of how this remarkably incompetent, irrational, and virulently anti-Semitic form of governance could do anything but quickly collapse in on itself.
In a letter to his friend Walter Benjamin, for instance, he wrote,
"For although I am certainly not optimistic and expect the future to bring a kind of right-wing
anarchy, the signs of collapse of the Nazi regime are nevertheless starting to accumulate so much
that one no longer needs to ignore them." And this is in 1934.
The walls are closing in.
Yeah.
They're gonna get Hitler any day now.
Any second.
You guys notice that Hitler's kind of maybe demented?
Like he's showing some signs of dementia.
I honestly think he could keel over any day.
There's this report being done by Heinrich Muller, I believe is his name.
Guaranteed.
Guaranteed there was somebody who was like, the police chief from down the street, he knows Hitler's worst crimes.
It's just a matter of time.
Oh, I talked to one of his officers and they've got Hitler on four counts of treason.
Just wait.
Just bide your time.
They're going to take him down.
Listen to this.
This is the Hitler piss phonograph.
While this position appears pretty absurd in retrospect, it seemed there was a certain historical precedent to support it.
The incompetency and eventual collapse of the fascist Dolfus regime toward our south, in Austria, was a clear demonstration of the consequence of irrational fascist politics, which is a lot of infighting that essentially creates this, you know, Right-wing anarchy.
Rodeau had falsely hoped that a similar form of Nazi incompetence in his own country would quickly destroy the party's grip on his motherland, imagining that the German population would be unwilling to allow a party that openly utilized violent street gangs and depended upon anti-Semitic rage to control the masses to continue dominating the state.
This observation was, of course, wrong.
While Adorno's prediction of a right-wing anarchy was certainly not optimistic, it was contingent upon, among other things, belief that the German people could not be subdued by Nazism.
Despite Adorno's early procrastination on leaving the country, he would eventually arrive in Britain in 1934.
As time went on, and the Nazi grip on Germany entrenched itself, Adorno would become disillusioned with his early conviction that his leave from Germany would be short, and permanently emigrated away from his motherland.
That is, until the Nazi threat could be extinguished.
He and other members of the Frankfurt School set their eyes on America, first New York and then California, as a semi-permanent place to settle.
And of course, you know, this is described in many right-wing YouTube videos as like the beginning of the Marxist infiltration that has, you know, accumulated in Joe Biden, our communist president.
Yeah, which is very funny because like Adorno and others were viewed as like, you know, they were German.
And so they were put on house arrest for like a large period of their stay, which is very, you know, like you would think that German Jews would not be, you know, despite their nationality, but I guess America.
Well, it's not like America likes either of those groups.
That's true.
That's true.
At that time, at least.
Now they love Germany.
They've converted many small California towns to attract more tourists to Bavarian sausages and such.
That is true.
Well, they didn't.
I mean, these are old colonies, but yeah.
Well, you got Solvang.
I guess that's Dutch.
They didn't, like, build it as a German Disneyland, but I like the idea of that.
Yeah.
During Adorno's self-imposed exile, he would dedicate much of his research to understanding how he was initially so wrong about the Nazis' ability to convince the German people to accept their rule.
And he would end up doing so immersed in the vibrant, advertisement-fueled ethos of American consumer-style capitalism.
While one might imagine this milieu to be a distraction from his task, it was actually, as it turns out, perfect.
Adorno had come to study the bizarre intricacies of American Hollywood movies, advertisements, radio shows, and other pop culture commodities to answer how modern society could produce a populace that accepted fascist propaganda so readily as it had in Germany.
As Adorno notes, those who oppose cultural fascism should start with Weimar.
Well, Adorno no longer had his German Weimar Republic, he did have an even more commodified culture to turn himself into, America.
And to understand how he conceptualizes this, we need to understand his idea of the culture industry, which is a concept that relates to the effects of culture becoming increasingly commodified and turned into, you know, a for-profit industry.
Culture, in our society, has increasingly become forced to answer to the laws of exchange, requiring that it justify itself at the practical level of making profits.
This stifles the ability for the cultural life of a society to uphold and appreciate authentic, complex, nuanced works of art that could never flourish if they were to be justified through how much profit they could generate, you know, a producer or an executive.
The culture industry produces a standardized, simplistic, easy-to-reproduce market of commodities that drowns out all else.
And crucially, for Adorno, this is an extension of the grip that capitalism has on the individual's life.
While one is forced to work more and more and has their free time increasingly cut short, the domination of the culture industry results in even one's free time being commodified.
This, in short, leads to an irrationality in culture that allows fascist demagogues to take advantage of people.
Some might see this commodification as a product of capitalism producing the best possible content for people.
Yet for Adorno, at least, the commodification of our free time is a result of very powerful capitalist firms bending the masses' interests towards a taste for cheap, simplistic commodities that they may easily reproduce.
I see this happening right now with my nephew and Marvel.
Like, no matter what the kid buys, whether it's a toothbrush or shoes or a Ziploc baggie, uh, you know, to put snacks in, there's a Spider-Man on it.
There's Hulk on it.
It's just, and I feel like this is all kids, like, growing up nowadays.
It's like, whatever you buy, Pampers or whatever, it's gonna have Captain America on it.
Yeah, and people just become used to this as a sort of background for our lives in a way that historically has just never really been seen before.
Yeah, this is kids.
Hey, you want to talk about kids?
You want to talk about babies, toddlers?
This is Spider-Man.
This is Venom.
This is Hulk.
These are, you know, these are the pillars of our society.
Yeah, kids are going to become journalists at this rate.
What was that Iranian Shia cleric who was like, how can we possibly respond to Trump killing Soleimani?
Who do we kill as their role model?
Spongebob?
Fun fact, Weezer has a really good track on the Spongebob movie soundtrack.
I encourage everybody to check it out.
It's way better than it should be, and it whips.
Off the mark here.
That's why I'm here.
I'm here to remind you that for every piece of depressing information that Liv brings, there is a Weezer track related to something.
A completely irrelevant tangent.
Thank you, and good night.
I think they shouldn't kill Spongebob, but they should kill all of Weezer.
What?!
Yeah.
They should do a kind of storm, but for Weezer the band.
Honestly, I do chuckle every time somebody shares the meme of the four-barreled gun, and it's like, we're coming for you, Weezer.
You know, they're always standing the four of them next to each other on the, you know, in front of a collar or whatever for their, you know, for their self-titled releases.
Oh boy, okay.
Yeah, Liv, please save us.
You might be unsure of this analysis, and fair enough.
People like cheap entertainment because that's the way we are.
There's always been cheap entertainment or, you know, low culture.
It's just that now it's being distributed via capitalism.
I think the best way of understanding the general point Adorno is making with the culture industry is to compare it to poor Americans' taste for fast food.
It might be easy to say this phenomenon is a result of the fact that we biologically crave fatty foods, as we were deprived of them in our evolutionary environment, and they're crucial for brain functioning.
Yet this does not explain the entire story, I don't think.
Many Americans over-rely on fast food as a result of poverty, being overworked, and food deserts, which are areas where access to affordable nutritious food is limited.
The single mother working two jobs will default to fast food instead of trying to use her limited time off to find the scant nutritious groceries she is able to cook.
People's unhealthy affinity for fast food is a reflection of incredibly powerful corporations sucking out as much profit as possible from them, even during their times off from work, which contributes to their health being destroyed.
While people have always desired food with higher amounts of fat, as we biologically crave it, there's a reason why, say, giving people more time to cook and better access to healthier groceries, on average, increases people's health.
We can think of this culturally, too.
The cheap entertainment of the culture industry is a product of capitalist hegemony in the cultural sphere.
While it's absolutely fine to engage with cheap entertainment, and I certainly do so quite a bit, if we as a society do it too much, there are very negative effects.
The culture industry replaces the heterogeneous world of artistic expression with this standardized uniform collection of mass-produced commodities, as if they're made on an assembly line that can be produced over and over again without any real artistic creativity.
Think about this in a contemporary example.
Our phones have sapped society's collective attention span.
People are reading books for fun at like an all-time low, replaced with 10-second short videos designed for the purpose of grabbing our attention.
And why do apps like Twitter, YouTube, TikTok give us cheap entertainment?
It's for ads.
The more time you spend watching it, the more advertisement money the corporation running the app gets.
The culture industry is not for Adorno.
A nefarious plot by the elite to make people stupid.
It's the elite's collective attempt to leverage their power over how culture is produced and, because of online algorithms distributed, to suck up as much money from people as possible.
While we've always desired cheap entertainment and amusement, it's never taken up so much of everyone's engagement with culture.
This becomes a problem when, as culture does, it affects people's perspective on the world.
They start to see it through the sort of filter of what they're given in this, like, cheap form of entertainment.
For Adorno, the oversaturation of simplistic cultural goods makes society more irrational.
No one ever thinks crucially that the culture industry functions through the phenomena of identification, which is like a Freudian thing, and I won't get into it too much.
But what you really need to understand is that executives and producers of the culture industry have realized that the best way to get people to come back again and again, even when you're serving them, you know, poorly thought out narratives and plots, is if people identify with the characters on screen.
In identification, one replaces your ego with the ego of the character.
The character becomes an ideal of what one wishes to morph their ego into.
When the character does well, you feel as if you've done well.
When they suffer, you feel as if you've suffered.
Most importantly, you begin to mimic how this character is represented on the screen.
This phenomenon, I think, is pretty observable in people's affinity for their favorite cultural product.
People have a very intense connection with pop cultural characters, even in, you know, shows and movies that are pretty poorly written.
You'll see like, I guess they call it Stans on Twitter for like just the most bizarre characters and the most bizarre, like people are just really intensely have an affinity with some of these random characters.
Wait, can I ask a clarification question?
I always thought that Stan was a reference to the Eminem song about the obsessed fan.
And that's and so if you're an obsessed crazy fan, you're called a Stan.
Yeah, that's right.
Okay.
I think it's ironic, or it was originally ironic, and now the original meaning of it is totally lost, and it just means like someone who likes someone else, which is sort of on the nose that we've lost the original meaning of that.
Yeah.
It fits though, doesn't it?
I mean, if you're like, oh, what a stan!
It's like, oh yeah, of course, I know exactly what you mean.
It's like when I call somebody a buggler, you know?
You know exactly what that means.
No, nobody knows.
What the fuck are you talking about?
It's the label on the tobacco.
Alright.
Bugler?
Bugler!
It's Bugler Man!
Like the bugle, the fucking instrument!
I like Bugler better.
But what does it have to do with tobacco?
Yeah, there's a brand of tobacco called Bugler.
It's like somebody who bugs you.
It's like, oh god.
I love Spider-Man.
He works at the Daily Bugle.
Well, that works!
It works, huh?
The daily buggle is like my ongoing life.
I'm just buggling my way from one scenario to the next.
Alright, continue.
Adorno thinks that this process of identification doesn't happen in virtue of the plots of movies and shows being particularly good, but instead as a stand-in for the production of genuinely well-thought-out artistic products.
The stronger you can get people to identify with characters, the more that they will be coming back for more products, despite how awful the plots of these products are.
One place we can see this very intensely, as I've covered in Premium Episode 183, is the anti-woke Star Wars fans who have a nostalgic identification with Luke.
They don't want new Star Wars movies to be good or complicated.
They especially don't want their father Luke to have character flaws.
They just want to see him go on adventures where he defeats the bad guys and is a bastion for everything straightforwardly good in the universe.
Which is why they hated, I think, the only good Star Wars sequel movie, The Last Jedi.
Because while it was at least better written in 7 and 9, their daddy Luke had character flaws.
And like, well we can't have that.
The culture industry strengthens this form of identification for the sake of maximizing profits.
As we see in the case of the Star Wars people, the stronger identification is, the less effort you have to put into thinking about the script.
Adorno thinks the strongest medium for conditioning this form of identification is film.
This is because film is the best method for displaying simplistic, lifelike representations of the world to the viewer.
What the culture industry has, above any independent artist above all, is a shit ton of money to throw at projects.
And is therefore unmatched in terms of its capacity to produce awe-inspiring, lifelike representations of the world.
As Adorno notes, "The whole world is passed through the filter of the
culture industry, the familiar experience of the moviegoer,
who perceives the street outside as a continuation of the film he has just left,
because the film seeks strictly to reproduce the world of everyday perception."
But then, so what about, like, the superheroes?
Well, you see them and it's like, well, it's just like their real life.
I love them.
They're amazing.
It's easier to think of them as a human being who you should emulate, like how you emulate, like, real human beings when you can really see them.
You know, I think in the case of superheroes, in a lot of cases, you're taking somebody who is kind of an exile or an outcast.
You know, a Captain America was, you know, very weak.
weak, small dude before he became Captain America.
Spider-Man, Peter Parker, was kind of a nerd before the Spider-Bin. - Yeah, right.
I see what you mean.
And the best part of the Spider-Man movies when I was growing up, the original Spider-Man movies,
the best part was when Peter Parker wakes up and he puts his glasses on and it's all blurry
and he takes them off and he's got perfect vision.
And then he's jacked in the mirror and then he beats up the bully
who's been making fun of him.
You know, this is fantasy for, you know, unathletic nerds like myself.
I was like, oh man, if I could just show up and be bouncing off the walls and doing, like, parkour kicks on, like, that basketball guy who I don't like.
Like, you know, I think there's a big... Parkour kicks?
There's a big attraction.
Now you also have superheroes like Batman who are just like really handsome rich guys with like a lot of toys who are also super badass at night, you know?
That's kinda hard to relate to.
I just like to dress up as the Joker and attend restaurants.
Well, there are some people who idolize the Joker, Julian.
You can be one of them.
That's a good point about, like, in the plots of a lot of movies, it's like, yeah, they're constructing it so that people, like, see themselves through these people, even if they're just, like, incredibly different.
You know, like someone with superpowers.
It's like, how do we get that person with superpowers to, like, appear similar to the average person enough that they'll identify with them?
Yeah.
Film is, in certain cases, able to gain power over people, not through creative artistic expression, but by showing the viewer fancy, lifelike representations of the world.
The more we identify with characters on the screen, because of how lifelike they are, the more real the movies feel.
The more likely we are to use it as a reference for how the world works in general.
While Adorno's views in cinema are definitely harsh, he's not outright condemning it, crucially.
And even if we were to tone down some of the severity of Adorno's analysis, it's still able to explain why high-production blockbuster films are the way that they are.
Like, even if film is able to produce, like, you know, whatever, authentic art, despite what sort of Adorno wants to assert, I think this process of identification is definitely a really important psychological aspect of people's, like, the way that people consume media.
And I'm not privileging myself here.
Everyone does this.
We're sort of...
You know, it's not like we're in a period where we're going towards movies that are like that.
I mean, I think the peak in the 70s and beyond, like, is long past.
I mean, I think now, highly processed cultural products, huge budgets, that has obviously completely dominated the industry.
Well, and I mean, for good reason.
I can't relate to the artsy movies.
I watched, um, Tar a couple weeks ago with Cate Blanchett.
And look, beautifully shot movie.
Cate Blanchett is amazing in it.
But I'm sitting there the entire time going like, I don't fucking care about, like, this rich, white, you know, like, you know, composer.
Like, oh, oh, and she, oh, she has an affair and falls from grace.
Boring!
Like, that's...
I can't relate to that!
You have to understand that movies didn't have to pick before, like, you could have an Alien, you could have a 2001, a Space Odyssey, you could have these movies that were, like, absolutely blockbusters of their time, but they also, they hadn't been completely colonized by, you know, the process of essentially, like, reverse engineering identification, and then, like, writing by committee, and then pushing tons of money into less and less projects to push out, you know, these lifelike representations and Yes, absolutely.
And the committee I think that you're referencing, at least as I sort of imagine it, is the team of executives who don't really understand creative or storytelling, but they know what hit in the past, they know what tests well.
Yeah, they're essentially like investors.
They're looking for return on investment and they're trading IP like it's, you know, public companies.
It's like an assembly line.
By the way, if any of you out there have a connection to the people that own Starcom, which was a popular 80s toy with magnets in their boots, I really think it's time for Starcom to come back.
We could do a children's cartoon and a line of toys.
This isn't the Classifieds!
We do a podcast!
There's a theme here!
I've been thinking about this a lot recently.
Travis, come on.
I know you had Starcom toys.
Come on, man.
I don't recall that.
God damn it!
Julian, you?
No.
Alright, please write me on Twitter.
Add me on Twitter if you know what I'm talking about and would like to join me in an endeavor to acquire the rights.
Thank you.
Contact him and make sure you have a mallet.
All this talk about popular culture and movies just get me!
Get my feathers ruffled!
I love that he's like, he's somehow... Puffed up!
I'm puffed!
I'm goosed!
He's seeing what Adorno does not right.
He sees the empty space left by what Adorno says and he is immeasurably excited.
Yeah, it's like the classic Dave Matthews song, The Space Between.
Where are we going today?
This is a disaster!
Please!
Alright.
And of course, as we said, there are incredibly good blockbuster movies.
And I enjoy them.
Both the really good ones and I think the base level ones.
I recently went to the new Top Gun movie and like thoroughly enjoyed it.
Hell yes.
It rocks.
I could do a whole episode with you on that Top Gun movie.
In fact, let's do it in the middle of this episode.
All right, all right.
Julian and Travis are so mad at me right now.
I'm going to lock you in my bathroom.
While Adorno might potentially rightfully call me a subject thoroughly conditioned by the culture industry for this, keeping his point about identification in mind while watching these types of blockbusters and enjoying them is quite revealing.
A certain aspect of the, I guess, charm of something like Top Gun is the characters are portrayed as just like incredibly cool people that you're meant to look up to.
The way they interact with others is meant to show you that they rock, and you should love them and care about them.
When the plot plays out and they go do their secret dangerous mission, you get worried for their safety, I think, because of this.
But they're not real in a certain sense.
They're a cookie-cutter stereotype of human relations.
They don't interact with others the way that I think people do.
Yeah, we watch these cheap products and a crucial part of the joy is being sort of tricked
into thinking they are real and that we should emulate them.
We come to think that, as I mentioned before, reality is a reflection of these movies and
these movies should be a filter to understand the world through.
It's insane that Adorno was able to study the anatomy of Jake so closely.
Yeah, I mean, I'm constantly writing dialogue to my real life in my head before I have a
conversation or about a conversation that will never happen.
Yeah.
It's just my brain interprets things.
I am the mark.
I am the person that they are trying to reach is somebody who finds it easier to interpret reality through fiction than none.
We need to take back the word Mark and replace it with Jake.
You're the Jake.
I think my name, though, is a slur for, like, police officers.
The Jakes, you know, the Jakes are coming to get us.
That's a slur?
I think it is, yeah.
What are you, part of a police union?
In the 1920s and 30s?
Sure.
Did you just call me a Jake?
Yeah.
I mean, I think it's important.
Like, Adorno thinks that everyone is sort of screwed.
And I think, like, the things that I consume, like TikTok and Twitter, are probably infinitely worse forms of entertainment.
Like, the constant desire, at least I have to look at my phone and check, is, like, far more, I think, like... And I think this is just as things get more commodified.
Because the reason why these apps are such attention grabbers is because, like, you know, they want you consuming ads constantly, 24-7.
So, yeah, I mean, it's not like Adorno is saying that we can get out of this by just, like, I will only consume what's cultural.
I won't look at, like, we're sort of all in this.
Oh, I thought we could just switch to TV.
Oh, yeah.
A non-commodified format.
Yeah.
No, streaming services are the move.
That's what Adorno would have said.
That's where all the art is.
Every like TV streaming service like their model now has actually regressed back to like the Tom Minks like adventure novels and like the 30s where literally every episode ends on some kind of cliffhanger and that's just like what they do now that's like when you go and pitch shows they want to know okay what are your cliffhangers like how is this going to be Bingeable.
It doesn't matter if the story's good anymore, it's just what elements do you have that's going to keep somebody watching until our little message comes up that says, are you still watching?
To which I say, yes, leave me alone.
I would like to watch another episode.
Of MILF Mansion.
Sorry, MILF Manor.
No, no.
I am going to watch that.
Is that out yet?
I can't keep my eyes away from stuff like that.
What would Adorno have said about MILF Manor?
Hover hover. That's the big one. Yes of course.
Yes, of course.
The clinical term.
Hubba hubba.
Frankfurt School.
Adjective.
I also think, like, even if we concede, Adorno is like a boomer who, like, in the 40s is just, like, figuring out that the sound film exists and is like, I hate this.
This is awful.
But even if we concede that he's wrong about, well, blockbusters can produce good art, it seems to not affect his overall point in a certain sense.
Adorno argues, I think correctly, that identification in the culture industry is so strong that even when a film has an admirable artistic vision, people are conditioned to enjoy the film through this sort of cheap identification with characters on screen and completely missing or ignoring the points of the film for this uncritical consumption.
My favorite example of this is right-wingers who watch Verhoeven's Starship Troopers and, like, just uncritically side with humanity.
Like, they think it supports their politics.
I wish they would beat those bugs.
Yeah, we gotta get the bugs.
They did 9-11.
They did bug 9-11 and we have to stop them.
The bugs control the financial system.
Young people from all over the globe are joining up to fight for the future.
I'm doing my part.
I'm doing my part, too.
They're doing their part.
Are you?
Join the mobile infantry and save the world.
Service guarantees citizenship.
Identification is so strong that like this Verhoeven film that's framed to satirize cheap pieces of propaganda is consumed as if it's cheap propaganda.
I think Adorno wants to also say that even people who are more media literate than this also fall victim to this phenomenon.
As he notes, When a film presents us with a strikingly beautiful young woman, it may officially approve or disapprove of her.
She may be glorified as a successful heroine, or punished as a vamp.
Yet, as a written character, she announces something quite different from the psychological banners draped around her grinning mouth.
Namely, the injunction to be like her.
This is why Adorno says that, like, whenever he goes to the movie, he feels more stupid.
Which is a very... It's hard not to do that, I think, in any movie.
To like look at, you know, there's a reason why actors are generally a lot more attractive than like the general population.
It's to present them like this.
Because I think even like higher quality films have picked up on this sort of technique of like things are a lot more real and a lot more gripping if you want to be like the characters.
And it's sort of conditioned against even the will of the actual directors.
The most absurd example of this, of identification despite, you know, the best wishes of a director, are the Sigma male beams, which seem to ironically, to like semi-ironically, to not ironically, identify with the fictional serial killer Patrick Bateman from the movie American Psycho.
For the uninitiated, sigma males were initially a sincere construction in the manosphere to explain a type of male that is somehow more dominant than an alpha.
He's a man who's not distracted by the ideals imposed on him by society, unlike the alpha male who's concerned with cheap and petty notions of prestige and social status.
The sigma takes what he wants and is successful at doing so.
And look, yes, I get it, I'm in on the joke, I know for the most part these are spread ridiculously, but like, there's a reason why some of these memes are not quite as ironic as they may appear.
Why so many right-wing men enjoy making and spreading edits, quote-unquote ironically celebrating Bateman's hatred of women and his, like, hustle grind set.
People like identifying with Bateman because they can justify their massive egos,
their desire to break all social conventions to take what they want.
They're narcissists. Identification allows them to see the demands of their massive egos met
in a character they identify with. It's weird, but remember, like at least for Freud,
identification results in the individual swapping their egos out with the person they identify with.
When they, you know, win, you feel like you win, which is a very common human thing.
You know, when you're rooting for someone.
Random example, I'm definitely not playing for my own experience, is like Jeopardy.
There's a guy in Jeopardy you like and he wins.
It's like, fuck yes.
I love this guy.
Yeah.
It's also interesting to think of like a Sigma Grindset online guy getting into the catalog of Genesis and Phil Collins because he like thinks Patrick Bateman's so cool.
Do you like Phil Collins?
I've been a big Genesis fan ever since the release of their 1980 album, Duke.
Before that, I really didn't understand any of their work.
It was too artsy, too intellectual.
It was on Duke where Phil Collins' presence became more apparent.
Well, I mean, what does it say about like, you know, our culture or more broadly fascism and popular culture where people are, you know, identifying or bragging about themselves being a psychopath like Patrick Bateman?
Well, when you hate the structure enough, then like anybody who opposes the structure or disrupts it in some way gives you a kind of visceral satisfaction.
I mean, that's certainly, you know, Trump's appeal.
Yeah, like the social norms of society are bumping up against your ego demands of like, hey, you're not supposed to like treat people like shit.
We're supposed to shame you for that.
And it's like, but I can vicariously live through this guy who doesn't give a fuck about that and still takes what he wants.
Based.
This type of narcissism that's satiated by identifying with people like Patrick Bateman for a dorno has gotten worse as more of our life has become commodified.
We must see each other more and more through a selfish lens, as fellow entrepreneurs who must compete to get a bigger slice of the pie.
And thus the culture industry serves us individuals often to identify with that meet the demands of our egos.
This fact is what makes identification in the culture industry so potentially dangerous.
I mentioned before that in identification you replace your ego with the ego of the character.
When this character gains something, in the case of Bateman, this relates to his business acumen, you feel as if you've gained something as well.
The individual has almost been tricked, when this gets more intense, into satiating their narcissistic drives by hitching their ego onto someone else.
Crucially, this type of identification is exactly how Adorno thinks the fascist propaganda works.
You simply swap out characters with a demagogue who promises that if you hitch their ego alongside his, that your narcissistic demands will be satiated.
Fascist propaganda often looks surprisingly similar to the irrational, simplistic narratives provided by the culture industry.
It promises a Manichaean battle between good and evil, and depends upon the viewer's lack of critical engagement with the product, essentially, in order to work.
Therefore, the fascist demagogue is able to trick potential followers into replacing their ego, which they desire to expand, with the egoims of the demagogue himself.
As Adorno notes, It is precisely this idealization of himself which the fascist leader tries to promote in his followers, and which is helped by the Führer ideology.
The people he has to reckon with generally undergo the characteristic modern conflict between a strongly developed, rational, self-preserving ego agency and the continuous failure to satisfy their own ego demands.
The fascist, through identification, arms themselves with the aggressive egos of their followers, whom he's tricked into following his commands as if it were their own.
Now this brings us to QAnon.
It seems clear to me, I think, that Anons deeply identify with Donald Trump and his war against the cabal.
They copy his speech patterns, they see threats to his well-being as an extension of threats to them, and they think they're working day and night to support their own interests through supporting his.
This is clearly not exclusive to Anons, of course, and regular old Trump believers seem to display a similar, if generally less intense, type of identification onto Trump.
This is not because Trump is some shrewd manipulator or has planned this, but simply the fact that he's a narcissist.
Narcissists like identifying with other narcissists because they're similar to them.
Much of Trump's success in the political sphere concerns his background as a supposedly successful businessman, whose entrepreneurial spirit could be applied to the realm of politics.
His business pitch for becoming president revolved around his capacity to make deals that benefit the American people, just as he was able to make deals that personally benefited him.
Those who support Trump typically imagine they may gain wealth and satiate their narcissism through him.
Through identification, they hitch their ego onto his.
Yet, of course, Trump could not care less for his supporters beyond their capacity to increase his power.
He leaves them cold and wet after rallies without transportation home, despite promising it, as a result of the fact that, you know, he's short on money.
And he even threw his supporters completely under the bus following January 6th to save himself from legal trouble.
I don't necessarily mean to call Trump a fascist, because that's a whole other thing, but it seems clear to me that QAnon uses Trump to stoke some far-right fascistic ideology, specifically taking advantage of the intense identification his supporters follow him for.
Now, if you were Q and wanted to stoke this identification with Donald Trump to a more intense degree, how do you think you would do it?
It appears that one of the tactics Q uses That was clearly successful given that he continued to do it was to make Anon see Trump like a protagonist in a blockbuster movie.
This is how I wish to present Q's obsession with Hollywood movies.
He wants to essentially evoke the feeling that an Anon gets identifying with characters in the movie theater from reading the drops.
Yeah, everybody essentially becomes the guy in the van, you know, who's outside the mission going, all right, about to hack into the mainframe.
Yeah.
We're a go.
You know, everybody, yeah, you become the role of, I don't know, pick a character from Hackers or whatever, and you're there.
You are guiding Solid Snake, you know, through the oil tanker.
Oh, you switched references.
I was going to say Serial Killer or, you know, Crash Override, but then you switched it.
I don't know either of those movies.
These are characters in Hackers.
Yeah.
I haven't watched it in a long time.
Okay.
I thought hacker protagonist.
I went, well, Otacon and Solid Snake, of course.
What the hell?
All right.
The first example of how Q does this for identification is from a drop I found in October of 2020.
We posted a photoshopped poster for the movie The Hunt for Red October with Trump standing in for the main protagonist.
You're meant to see Trump as the protagonist of his plot against the cabal.
We're un-nuanced supervillains causing you harm and suffering, just as the villains of blockbuster films harm the characters on the screen.
And Q essentially says this exact thing.
Here are a couple examples from different drops.
People kill people.
You are watching a movie.
They want you weak.
Slave.
Cheap.
Distraction.
Coincidence.
Everything shown has meaning.
You are watching a scripted movie.
Sometimes a good movie can provide a lot of truth and or background.
That's just plain badly written by you.
So badly written.
Sometimes a good movie.
I'll give you a list of movies I think are good.
In a sense, Q is attempting to invoke the same feeling in his propaganda that an anon feels when they're in the movie.
If it could happen in a movie, it could happen in real life.
And if it's happening in real life, then you need a protagonist figure to identify with that may solve the problem.
This may help us understand the litany of movie references that pepper Q Anon's canon.
Adrenochrome is one example of such.
While the drug does technically exist, American society became fascinated with it mainly because of its fictional depiction as some sort of psychotropic drug, which to be clear it is not, in cultural products such as Huntress Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
While yes, this is a book, they did make it into a movie.
Huntress Thompson's book is the first fictionalized depiction of adrenochrome, where it's extracted from the adrenal gland of a living individual, which is clearly something that's copied in QAnon.
What is this shit?
That stuff makes pure mescaline seem like Ginger beer, man.
Adrenochrome.
Adrenochrome?
Hmm.
Any clip of the scene in this movie where they use adrenochrome that's uploaded to YouTube will be full of pilled people exclaiming how Hollywood shoves their evil practices right in our faces, not even hiding that they're a part of the evil cabal.
This is, of course, because QAnon's think that Hollywood is a part of the satanic pedophiles.
Essentially all the more recent comments on such YouTube videos read things such as... I can't believe they actually put this out there and nobody paid attention.
This is mind-boggling.
I like how this movie displayed adrenochrome use and no one cares.
They put all the signs in movies.
They are proud.
To which one user responds... Yup, and this was made in 1998, long before anyone ever heard of QAnon.
Potentially the most perplexing comment of the bunch reads...
The best way to hide something is to put it on site for everyone to see.
Very shoddily written.
Which is in and of itself something that comes from movies.
If you want to hide something, no, you want to put it in a place where nobody's going to find it in real life.
Only in the movies are they able to get away with hiding something in plain sight so that there can be what you would call a reveal at the end.
And they're still doing this in movies nowadays.
I don't know if you guys watched the latest Rian Johnson film, Glass Onion, the sequel to... Bro, one of the worst goddamn movies on the planet.
But there's, you know, there's a huge plot point in that where this thing that they are looking for has been hiding in plain sight all along for everybody to see.
It's a huge trope, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, that movie is just, to me, I thought it was an exercise in tropes.
Yeah.
In a lot of ways.
How many tropes can we play with?
It was an exercise in diarrhea.
I liked it.
These sorts of comments are, in general, how anons seem to justify the obviously bizarre contradictions between their disdain for Hollywood and their use of Hollywood imagery to essentially explain the world.
Even when they believe Hollywood is ran by Satan-worshipping pedophiles, they can't help but admit that Hollywood movies are handing them the truth about world events.
They engage with Hollywood the same way they essentially did before.
Point out movies give them this truth about the world because of some sinister desire that Hollywood has to admit the crimes they're an accomplice of.
Well, and there's also the conundrum of, you know, if you're a QAnon follower or just a general sort of like MAGA or conservative champion, the movies that are being made for you are absolute dog shit.
I mean, we've covered a few of them, the Hunter Biden movie and the movie from the Dukes of Hazzard guy about the flag.
You know, it's like as any person, you can't watch those and not in the back of your mind go like, Oh man, like Marvel did it better or like the Hollywood pedophiles like did it better.
So it's like on the one hand, it's like, well, you, you can't really turn to like your own kinds of content.
And so, you know, if you have to watch the cabals content, you know, at least you're going to use it to prove a point from your sort of ideology.
Yeah.
That is, like, because there is such a demand, I guess, by, like, pilled people for good movies.
It's so terrifying to think, like, will that ever be filled properly or is Hollywood going to have?
Well, that's why I'm terrified of this Jim Caviezel Underground Railroad movie.
That's never coming out!
Yeah, that keeps getting put back.
The moment they get a star player with, like, good production value, you know, some action scenes of him, you know, raiding the underground adrenochrome farms.
I think it'll take us to a whole new level.
I don't know.
So I'm hoping that movie does not come out.
Well, it's been years.
You never know.
Okay.
Life finds a way.
Julian, what is the worst and or funniest results of this?
Is the movie comes out.
So it has to happen.
Yeah, I suppose so.
I don't know.
I think something went deeply wrong with it.
They've just been like showing it.
There's some rich guy in I think Mexico who bought the rights for it in Central America or maybe all of Latin America and he's been showing it in screenings in like churches.
Yeah.
Well, what happens is that word gets around town.
If you've got a QAnon movie and all of your players are majorly pilled and on the record, you know, advocating for QAnon beliefs or adrenochrome or any, you know, some kind of weird conspiratorial misinformation, Word gets around really fast and, you know, what I imagine happened is that people quickly figured out that everybody involved with this thing, you know, is kind of toxic and so they're distancing self.
Nobody wants to release it.
And so where are they going to do?
They're going to do showings in churches, maybe try to get into some like Christian festivals.
I don't know.
I mean, it doesn't look good for it having some kind of mainstream sort of release that ends up pilling the masses.
I don't think that that's going to happen.
That's why we must rely on the only possible hero, potential producer, Mel Gibson.
Yeah.
Come on, buddy.
Take the executive role.
Still making movies.
Probably believes in Adrenochrome.
Probably believes in QAnon.
He's working with Caviezel on the sequel.
They're about to start filming the sequel to Passion of Christ.
Yeah.
If we have a crazy-pilled pipeline where we go, what's the Underground Railroad guy's name?
Tim Buckler?
Tim Buckwheat?
Tim Buckwheat? I don't know. Tim Buck two? What's his name?
Tim? Tim Ballard, isn't it? Ballard. Tim Ballard.
So if we have a Tim Ballard pills Caviezel who then in turn pills Mel Gibson if he hasn't
been pilled already on QAnon stuff I mean then things could get really interesting because for
some reason Hollywood is still letting Mel Gibson make movies
Despite him being recorded on tape saying some of the most awful things
That we've heard from from a celebrity of his status I don't know, he seems cool to me.
I mean, I don't think he seems cool, actually.
Based on everything I've heard, he sounds like he's scary to be around.
That is a clear reverse of everything you've said so far on this podcast.
Go back hundreds of episodes, folks, you'll see him defend Mel.
I don't defend Mel.
I will defend movies that he happens to play in, like Signs, okay?
I think Signs is a great movie.
I think Signs is a great Mel Gibson performance.
That doesn't mean that I don't also think that he's a real piece of shit.
Okay, well, no one's canceling Jake today, I guess.
Sad, we can move on.
Another important movie reference embedded within QAnon is their rallying cry, or We Go One, We Go All, which, if you didn't know, was taken from the Ridley Scott coming-of-age film, White Squall.
Specifically the trailer!
Oh yeah, you don't even need to watch the film.
No.
Yes, the scene that got clipped of all of the cadets yelling, where we go one, we go all, is not in the actual movie.
It only appears in the trailer of the film.
Now, they say where we go one, the line is in the film, but the specific scene where all the people are chanting it?
Not in a movie.
Okay.
That's awesome.
So we're not even, we're not even at, like, watching movies now.
We're like, no.
Yeah, just taking a trailer moment you like.
That's why, like, I don't know about the Jim Caviezel thing, because it's like, I feel like people can just do that on YouTube now.
They don't need, they don't need, like, a movie to go and watch to do, to get this, to get this identified.
Yeah, I don't know.
Yeah, it might be irrelevant at this point.
Yeah, I don't know if it'll, in our era.
We'll see.
I guess we'll see.
I think that's the new form of QAnon that works on Zoomers.
It's not going to be movie-based, it's going to be TikTok-based.
But here's an interesting point.
If Taken came out right now, it would be a QAnon movie.
Whereas when Taken came out, there was no kind of political juju to be extracted from it.
You were just like, oh fuck yeah, kick-ass Liam Neeson franchise.
It's just him going around and executing a lot of Albanians.
But if Taken were to come out today, I think it would be interpreted as a, this is a filmmaker who's trying to expose the truth about adrenochrome and child trafficking.
I'm sure, I'm sure.
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure.
But I mean, just in as much as they do that to everything at this point, I mean, if they're capable of doing it to Monsters, Inc., obviously they would be capable of doing anything.
Which I think also brings up a really interesting point, and I've actually had this discussion with some filmmakers who listen to the podcast, is that a lot of times the QAnon people don't choose the film that would best illustrate their, you know, best illustrate what they're trying to sort of convey.
Like, Taken is a really good example, and Q doesn't mention it once.
I never really hear it.
It's never mentioned in Connection, you know, in the same breath as Anons and Adrenocomb and Human Trafficking and all of that stuff.
A lot of times, yeah, it almost seems like the movies that were picked are so arbitrary.
I mean, unless they happen to come from a Tom Clancy book in which there are a handful.
That's because Taken has carefully chosen someone over age.
So it is a movie about sex slavery, but not pedophilia.
I honestly think a lot of it is like, just they choose which one has the most, like, striking power on them psychologically.
Like, which one do they identify with the most?
Yeah, or maybe something that's not easily obvious.
Yeah.
So that somebody goes, oh, I'm going to watch Hunt Red October or Some of All Fears and see what I can extrapolate.
It actually gives you an opportunity to bake the movie as opposed to watching it taken or whatever and going, oh, pretty self-explanatory.
They want to bake it, yeah.
I think that assumes that QAnon is this well-crafted, well-thought-out set of references to movies, whereas it's really, like, whatever movies hit the, like, weird brains of, like, probably the Watkins and then this guy Paul Ferber.
I mean, think about it.
Or whatever they liked when they were growing up.
Movies that had an effect on them.
And they have shit taste.
That's why they bring up The Godfather 3.
Look at me.
I'm a perfect example.
What do I reference on this show?
Aliens, Weezer, Ghostbusters.
These are the popular culture elements that made me.
That's what I want to talk about, you know?
I don't know any of those.
What are those?
A couple movies in a band.
Okay.
But yeah, I mean, I think it is much more probable that these are just the things that were stuck in the craw of the author or authors who were writing the drops.
I think, like, critically in relation to Adorno and what he's claiming, it really wouldn't matter which movie they chose because almost all of them can provide this kind of weird reactionary identification thing.
Like, there's so many movies and a lot of them are churned out by the very beast.
Clear bad guy, clear good guy, a flawed hero, something that they have to overcome.
You know, the very formula of what makes a movie that tends to get made and go to the theaters or release on VHS, whatever.
Most movies are essentially reactionary, anti-communist.
They're usually misogynist.
You know, I mean, they do embrace these stories and that hasn't really changed.
Yeah.
That's why I love them.
Look, that's why I like movies.
Okay.
Back to White Squall.
Keke uses this film to essentially evoke the camaraderie and teamwork depicted in the film as an ideal for the QAnon movement.
The real storm, as it turns out, was the friends that we made along the way.
We're all a bunch of twinks who are getting drowned.
Exactly.
Smart pick.
Yeah, that's a good... that's basically what happened on January 6th.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know about the twink.
They came from different places.
And this Ocean Academy isn't recognized as accredited.
It'll be a good thing, Dad.
They sailed for different reasons.
I don't wanna be what I was when I left.
There you go.
Anonymous.
But there was only one way.
We'll do it together.
I can't.
Climb!
To survive on his ship.
I will challenge them, and they will come together.
Become a team.
When we go one, we go all.
Anons are also so convinced by these movie analogies that they've collectively come to decide that the film White Squall is not, in fact, where these rallying cries come from.
Or at least some of them have.
This is funny given the fact that Q has at least referenced White Squall indirectly.
No.
Instead, where we go when we go all is derived from the silver freedom bell hanging off of JFK's presidential yacht.
There is not, in fact, a bell that is hanging off of JFK's presidential yacht.
Instead, they've imagined that the bell hanging off of the ship in White Squall is actually owned by JFK.
Another movie reference that Q invokes is The Matrix.
One drop by Q reads, Coincidence the Matrix movie grew people as a crop, used for energy, and controlled their mind?
Sound familiar?
Wonder where they derived that idea from?
As an allegory, I'm guessing that's how they derived that idea.
The human body generates more bioelectricity than a 120 volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat.
Combined with a form of fusion, the machines had found all the energy they would ever need.
We have this same weird backwards causality, seen in like the anons who think the use of adrenochrome in media before QAnon is evidence that QAnon is correct, going on here.
Q seems to be implying here that Hollywood producers are getting writing ideas based off of the evil things they're helping facilitate in real life.
I guess?
Like, isn't that essentially what he's saying?
But he's fundamentally, though, this message implies that what happens on the big screen is a reflection of reality.
Wishes to say this while also wishing to tell anons that Hollywood is super evil and you shouldn't trust them.
But you should trust them insofar as their ideas can confirm that QAnon is real.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, and they're giving, you know, screenwriters and filmmakers, I think, way too much credit here.
Usually, when you write a movie, it's to hide whatever might be going on in your real life, or it's an allegory for it, so that the real truth, you know, isn't, you know, staring you right in the face.
In the example of The Matrix, it was the Wachowskis, you know, wrestling with their identity.
But the movie isn't about somebody transitioning.
It's hidden behind this, you know, sort of video game science fiction plot that, you know, it's only when, you know, you listen to interviews with the directors that you go, oh, OK, yeah, that makes sense as an allegory for this.
Somehow, like, they've managed to justify the idea that Hollywood are bastions of truth while also viewing them as evil pedophiles.
It's a very impressive sort of mental gymnastic.
Yeah, it's a kind of literalism, which they also apply to the Bible.
Right.
And they say, you know, although it may seem like this is a fantastic science fiction story, the truth is that it's real.
It's just straight real.
It's a direct depiction, essentially, of what they're doing and they're rubbing it in your face.
But now that you've figured it out, now we can take them down.
Other classic examples of QAnon using movie references include Going Down the Rabbit Hole from Alice in Wonderland, CIA brainwashing and memory loss techniques from The Bourne Identity, and of course, I guess indirectly, JFK conspiracy theories from Oliver Stone's JFK.
While you might think some of the, or all of the Adorno stuff I explained was ridiculous, it seems bizarrely on the nose that this theorist writing in the 1940s was able to make such a pressing connection between fascist propaganda and commodified popular culture.
Keep in mind that Adorno is writing this stuff about culture in the 40s.
They just invented films with sound, and this guy is saying they're a perfect tool to get the masses used to fascist propaganda.
So, considering how much QAnon uses movies, there might be some merit to what this guy's saying, at least.
And you shouldn't take this as me telling you not to watch movies.
If Adorno is right, it's pretty much Jover for us as individuals.
So, you know, don't worry.
Sit back.
Enjoy the show.
Grab some popcorn.
Yeah.
Oh my god.
Good.
Full circle.
Parodying Q.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
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Listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
