North American Cinema and the “negative primacy.” (exhibition at the JCP of the UBA)

Cinema is not mere entertainment. It is a cultural artifact that constructs imaginaries and legitimizes power practices. This presentation proposes a critical reflection on American cinema as a vehicle for the naturalization of United States political and military interference abroad. Hollywood has functioned as a soft propaganda mechanism that presents intervention as a civilizational mission, moral duty or strategic necessity, hiding its human, political and ethical costs.

This reflection makes sense in Pochoclo and Politics 2026 | Dystopias, a space to think about political science and international relations through cinema, within the framework of the UBA Political Science Conference (JCP-UBA). Dystopia offers us a sharp prism to examine the excesses of power and denaturalize the hegemonic narratives that commercial cinema has consolidated from the existence of the first Nikelodeons to current streaming platforms.

In dystopian or authoritarian cinema, it is common to find references that evoke historical episodes such as slavery, discrimination or persecution for racial or religious reasons. These narratives constitute, in essence, a reflection of those moments in which the United States played a leading role, almost always as the victimizer. When the country's universalist self-perception collides with the exclusive limits of racial and imperial supremacism, the film story tends to mutate towards a kind of condescension with the antagonist, trusting that his evil responds to a determinism that corrupted his original goodness. This determinism, associated with collectivist ideologies, stands as the conceptual antithesis of the sociopolitical tradition of classical liberalism, which in the United States has functioned as a unifying story.

In this perception, elements appear that appeal to an aspirational and divided individual, a legacy of the Protestant current, especially the Puritan and Calvinist traditions, which conceived themselves as a "New Israel", a people chosen by God to fulfill a singular purpose. This doctrine held that US territorial expansion and global influence were not mere political desires, but a divine mandate. In this way, the dystopian is impregnated with the principles of a supremacist exceptionality that would later be transferred to fictional propaganda about Nazi-fascist regimes.

One might think, then, that the antithesis of American divine liberalism would be Nazism. However, despite the insistence on pointing it out as the absolute enemy, collectivism, from the criticism of egalitarian hegemony, continues to be the most abhorrent threat to North American cinema. Nazism is presented as the incarnation of that which is rejected in the national testimony: the denial of everything that was sustained after its fall. But the illegal experiments on the African-American population, the extermination campaigns in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the racist and ultra-nationalist propaganda dressed in commercial consumerism... everything suggests that Nuremberg was not a trial, but the renewal of Nazism under the alibi of defending individual "freedom of expression." However, the individual does not exist alone, but collectively, anonymously influenced by the same propaganda apparatus that, under the supposed "egalitarian hegemony" of ideological expression, selects those currents that threaten that same freedom. Racism, misogyny, xenophobia and classism turn out to be the most aligned with this discourse, precisely because they do not question the privileges of those who spread them.

Another influence of manifest destiny is found in the expansionist character of the United States. The belief in Anglo-Saxon and Protestant superiority was used to legitimize wars and annexations. The war against Mexico (1846-1848), which culminated in the loss of half of the Mexican territory, was justified as a divine act intended to "civilize" populations considered inferior. President John Quincy Adams expressed this idea by stating that the entire continent seemed "destined by Divine Providence" to constitute a single nation. However, this expansionist aspiration reveals an internal fragility in its own origin: that of being a unified territory. The self-designation as "United States" reveals the need to make explicit in the name what one wishes to impose as a national identity: an adjective instead of a proper noun. This same tension appears recurrently in all North American dystopian productions: the fear of fragmentation and religious fanaticism, which curiously is feared could be used as an argument for local separatism.

Films such as The Postman, The Book of Eli, Mad Max or The Purge expose the collective unconscious of a population identified with dream aspirations, whether political, such as national unity, or economic, such as the American dream. Dreaming is always an individual act, and in the structure of the North American archetype it is called fiction. The absence of cities, electrical devices or activities beyond agricultural work becomes the nightmare that dystopia necessarily portrays: chaos and tyranny. This tyranny is conceived in the scarcity of the population, in its poverty, and in a poverty, it should be noted, imposed by the State. Thus, in The Hunger Games, the inhabitants of the districts are stripped of their belongings and physical well-being; Likewise, in Snowpiercer, the population of the last car must remain in absolute poverty to maintain the fictitious balance with the most privileged cars. Symbolic collectivism, appealing to unity and order, loses legitimacy when questioned by the absence of that which prevails in the reality of many countries that forcibly adopted mercantile and speculative capitalism, and whose populations live in poverty.

But here we find the true dystopia implicit in the propaganda dystopias of the United States: the dystopia of freedom. The problem is not poverty itself, but the belief that this poverty is imposed by the State through collectivist restrictions. From propaganda, individual scarcity is presented as necessary for the sustenance of others, and the rebellion of the individual is excused in the corrupt hypocrisy of the regime and in the complicity of the "parasite" that lives off the State. Not even in the cyberpunk genre, where the Nazi-fascist imaginary is abandoned for absolute control exercised by corporations, does it delve into the responsibility of capitalism and market freedom in the miserable conditions of existence. In this genre, the nonconformist hero is not such; He is just a frustrated and disappointed young man, while the population, lacking roots, settles for miserable mediocrity.

The absolute State and the mediocre masses constitute the most recurrent propaganda object of the dystopian genre, in order to justify the liberal ideology of its literary writers and, later, of its consumers. The hero is just a frustrated individual who upholds principles defrauded by the State, which institutionally concentrates the application of any collectivist ideology. Paradoxically, the absence of the State responds to the capitalist concentration of the means of production in a single company, which assumes coercive functions. This aspect is revealing: if the Marxist logic of the State as an extension of capitalist power is applied, it is observed that, in the capitalist Asian countries that inspired the origin of cyberpunk, it was an absolutist State that boosted profits and economic concentration in a few companies, becoming the State and the company the same entity. And, at the risk of delving into this objective truth about the material conditions of our time, freedom is then revealed as the ideology of collective misery, which justifies the corrupt and immoral power of companies over the majority of workers.

While we observe how communist and collectivist powers, such as China, Vietnam or Belarus, solve the medical, labor and educational needs of their people, in the West these indicators begin to deteriorate, justifying all this under the story of the manifest destiny of empowered individuals, where some are “more equal than others.” However, individual empowerment lacks support if it is not articulated with a community that guarantees fair living conditions. Therefore, in the liberal system, individual exceptionalism is always achieved at the expense of others, whom dystopian propaganda presents as accomplices of an absolutist State or as parasites dependent on it. Dystopia is the terror of those who live from the real dystopia of the majorities in the West, hiding and discrediting, since the Cold War, the satisfaction of the basic needs of the majorities in socialist societies. Censorship and single-party control may plunge the masses into ignorance, the same ignorance that Hollywood's propaganda apparatus encourages, but they do so in pursuit of a specific goal: justifying the power of a few by improving the living conditions of the people, in exchange for loyalty.

The growing dissatisfaction in consumerist societies shows the productive need for dystopian scenarios in which the antagonist is redeemed by allying himself with the axis of "good", betraying and fighting the true enemy: collectivism, whether in its religious or political aspect. Never, however, is collectivism attacked in its economic dimension; If this were to happen, the enemy would become society itself. Therefore, a deepening of these narrative elements is to be expected. While series like The Handmaid's Tale or films like One Battle After Another receive applause for their denunciations, the books that inspired them are censored and their directors remain indifferent to the victims of the reality they supposedly portray. The dystopia of our time thus survives in the packaged and processed contradiction of two naive positions that attempt to establish themselves as absolute truths in the superfluous gatherings of frustrated and nihilistic people.

The most revealing contradiction of the dystopian genre is that, while it denounces fictitious authoritarian regimes, it makes invisible the real violence of the system that produces it. The filmic dystopia thus becomes a moral alibi that allows the Western viewer to feel challenged by injustice, without ever questioning the privileges that sustain their own position in the world. In this sense, the true power of dystopia is not in what it shows, but in what it hides. While cinemas project totalitarian futures, the present continues to be the scene of a real dystopia, that of a freedom that only a few can fully exercise, and an equality that is postulated as an ideal while it is consumed as a lack. The critical challenge, then, consists of unlearning the hegemonic narrative and learning to look behind fiction, where cinema does not reach or prefers not to look.

Because, ultimately, the most disturbing dystopia is not the one that imagines a future without hope, but the one that prevents us from recognizing that we already live in it.

If this analysis resonated with your way of thinking about cinema and politics, I invite you to follow me on my social networks, where we continue to dismantle hegemonic narratives and explore the contradictions of power through audiovisual culture. There I share more reflections, debates and materials that deepen these ideas.

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