The Electric State: Accidental Anti-Capitalism in the Form of a 320 Million Dollar Children's Movie

When I first learned about McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare in high school, our history teacher showed us the 1956 sci-fi horror classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. If you haven't seen it, I suggest you remedy that ASAP and perhaps reexamine your life choices. In the film people start changing their personalities while they sleep, becoming part of a collective alien species aiming to colonize the whole planet. My teacher explained how there were two competing interpretations of the film. It could be seen as an allegory for the threat of communism. Stay awake and vigilant or the commies will take over and strip you of your individuality. Or it could be an allegory for the creeping threat of McCarthyism. Stay awake and vigilant or the fascists will take over and strip you of your individuality.

That film, and the discussion about it, is largely responsible for my love of subversive fiction and it still shapes the way I view movies and television to this day. I was, and still am, fascinated by how a movie can tell two or more different stories at the same time. It wasn't until I was much older that I learned from Wikipedia, the one true source of all information in the universe, that the filmmakers may not have been aiming for allegory at all. Indeed, director Don Siegel viewed the pods not as an allegory for communists of fascists but for soulless movie studio executives.

None of this detracts from my enjoyment of the film. I still choose to view it as an allegory for the threat of fascism because that makes me enjoy the film more. That's part of the beauty of art. Only you can decide what a piece of art means to you. Art can be interpreted in a number of ways beyond the creator's original intent. Which brings me, at long last, to the subject of this review: The Electric State.

If you've read anything about Netflix's 320 million dollar adaptation of Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag's beloved graphic novel, you've probably been informed that the movie is a crime against humanity. I think a lot of this backlash stems from the Russo brothers' apparent belief that they were making another Marvel movie. Perhaps because they were adapting a graphic novel, they thought that's what it should be. Perhaps they just don't know how to make any other kind of movie. Regardless, it's clear that the Russo bros didn't understand the assignment. Anthony Russo basically said as much when promoting the movie.

We just looked at the images and the story that he unfolds in the graphic novel. It is very opaque. It’s kind of hard to understand it. You get it in glimpses. You can tell there’s a much larger world behind what he’s telling you in the graphic novel that you can only guess at.

-Anthony Russo

Unfortunately it seems a lot of their guesses were wrong. As an adaptation, the film fails. The source material is a somber exploration of the desolation wrought by late-stage capitalism and addictive, dehumanizing technology. The movie feels like it was made for first graders or the type of people who think Minions memes are the pinnacle of humor.

If you approach it as a children's movie, disregard its status as an adaptation, and don't think too much about the ridiculous amount of money spent making it, the film isn't so bad. Yes, the acting is uninspired, and the action movie one-liners are lame and out of place. Yes, the script was assembled from spare parts left over from other, better, teen dystopian films. Yes, it attempts to water down the story into a confused, paint-by-numbers morality play with a lot of mixed metaphors about racism. Or something. But despite their best efforts to pasteurize the source material and produce another soulless, bloated corporate-friendly blockbuster, the spirit of the original work managed to bleed into the final product. At least a little.

The story is pretty standard low-effort dystopia stuff. There's the evil empire, run by the bastard child of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, Ethan Skate played by Stanley Tucci. There's the ragtag resistance led by Mr. Peanut (yes, that Mr. Peanut), voiced by Woody Harrelson. Finally, there's the plucky teen (Millie Bobby Brown) and her quirky traveling companions (Chris Pratt, Anthony Mackie, and Alan Tudyk) who help Mr. Peanut find his nuts again and restart a robot rebellion. Aside from Michelle (Brown's character) and her brother, who is trapped in the body of a bot, none of this stuff comes from the book.

The film's garish sentient robots, also not in the book, are essentially a slave race built to serve capitalism. When they become sentient and start demanding rights, they become a threat to the power of capital. As has been the case throughout America's history, the government has capital's back. The full force of the state attempts to crush labor's collective power with the help of corporate industrialist Ethan Skate. Skate's company, Sentre, develops an advanced brain-computer interface called the Neurocaster, which allows humans to control combat drones to fight the robots. These new drones are effective at crushing the worker rebellion and ending the robot war.

In the aftermath, Skate becomes incredibly wealthy and powerful. Sentre controls its own private drone army, seemingly without any governmental oversight. Other than the opening info dump that first tells us about the robot war, we see very few signs of any functioning government. Even the schools, presumably still public institutions, require all students to use Neurocasters to connect with their teachers in Sentre's virtual reality. This world, much like our own, seems to be run by a giant corporation.

After the war, Neurocasters allow people to live in a digital fantasy world while the real world crumbles around them. In a fawning televised puff piece, reporter Madeline Vance, played by Holly Hunter, calls it, "escapism for the masses."

"I prefer to think of it as freedom," Skate replies.

This vision of freedom sounds like a wet dream for the rich techno utopian assholes currently infiltrating every layer of the United States government. These assholes have succeeded in commodifying our attention via social media, placing themselves in between our relationships to show us advertisements and sell us junk. The Neurocasters are a more extreme version of the same concept. Instead of co-opting just social lives, they co-opt entire lives and the entire culture along with them. Like modern social media, Sentre's product shreds the fabric of society while offering a simulated reality as a consolation prize. The worse the world becomes, the more desirable their product becomes, creating a negative feedback loop that will inevitably implode.

The movie concludes with a cardinal sin of storytelling: not trusting the audience. To be fair, the audience should be forgiven if they hadn't picked up on the clumsy attempts at conveying a watered-down message. Still, Michelle's after school special speech to explain the moral of the story is cringe:

The things Sentre did, they weren't just bad for robots, they were bad for all of us. I know the war happened and things fell apart and life really sucked and, maybe for a little while, the Neurocasters helped you forget that. We got so used to it that we thought that's what real life is. But it's not. Real life, it's contact. It's you and me.

Michelle in The Electric State

Ah yes, if only everyone would put their phone down and go hug a butterfly or something, the world's problems would be solved. Social media is an easy target. The critique is present in the source material, so the Russos didn't have to think too hard to come up with it. Most everyone watching Netflix likely also uses social media in some capacity, and those same users likely despise it in some way. It has made our world worse, just like Neurocasters have in The Electric State. Yet we keep using it. We're addicted to it as surely as the Neurocaster junkies in the film.

Capitalism is also an easy target these days, though not as easy as social media, and not one I think Marvel's golden boys were aiming at. The Russo brothers are the children of lawyers. They went to private school. Hollywood has made them very rich. In other words, they are very much creatures of capitalism. The capitalist desolation depicted in the book is present in the movie, despite the effort to shift the focus more toward social media.

For example, the early exposition tells us that bots were first invented to serve guests at Disneyland. In other words, the mechanized menace originated from a mecca of American capitalism. Or consider the bots, many of which are not just oppressed workers but also brand avatars. Their identities revolve around corporate brands, similar to the way many people in the real world build their entire identities around one fandom or another, often ones related to Disney-owned media franchises.

The evils of social media and capitalism are so entangled, it is near impossible to critique one without the other. Tyrannical algorithms insert themselves between our communications on social media. We speak in memes, kinda like Michelle's brother Christopher, played by Woody Norman, can only speak in catchphrases from the Kid Cosmo cartoon.

Social media companies strive to slake capitalism's unquenchable thirst for growth and profit with a toxic brew of maximized engagement, distilled by the fires of outrage, and damn the consequences. This evil is not a necessary component of social media, but it is required for a capitalist social media company. It is an evil perfectly in line with the platonic ideal of the capitalist corporation as an amoral entity.

Like with Siegel and Body Snatchers, the Russos don't get to control how their work is interpreted. But perhaps it is unfair to label anything in The Electric State as a critique of capitalism. Perhaps simply by depicting what capitalism does, the critique emerges. At the end of the day, capitalism is just one system of distributing resources. And perhaps the most damning indictment here is that this system just distributed 320 million dollars worth of resources into this barely mediocre film.