6 Mainstream Movies with Leftist Viewpoints

Nobody wants to read Das Kapital. If you’re looking to brush up your leftist bonafides or covertly indoctrinate your friends and family, try some of these movies!

First Blood

Why it’s leftist: Anti-Police

The name “Rambo” is synonymous with mindless gun violence. However, the first movie featuring Sylvester Stallone’s character, John Rambo, First Blood, was actually an intelligent story about a Vietnam veteran with PTSD who is just passing through a small town and ends up being terrorized by the local police. Of course the police are completely unprepared when they encounter someone willing and able to resist their lawless tyranny.

Police are routinely depicted as heroes, or at worse as bad apples in a good system. First Blood was really ahead of its time in presenting an entire police force as rotten. Its not a depiction of police robbing banks but rather engaging in a kind of lawlessness that many people don’t seem to understand: they’re harassing and arresting people for no reason. Crucial to the story, Rambo repeatedly shows restraint and the police repeatedly escalate the situation. At one point Rambo’s former commanding officer shows up and tells the police their charges against Rambo are crap and the only way to de-escalate the situation is to just let Rambo go. The police refuse. The police in First Blood are the poster children for defunding.

One criticism of the film: First Blood’s depiction of a straight white male war hero as a repressed demographic subject to police brutality is… odd. Stallone carries the role well enough, but I’d like to see this movie remade with a black man as Rambo. Some parts of First Blood that weren’t entirely clear would take sharp new meaning with a black Rambo. This line the sheriff says to Rambo particularly springs to mind: “First of all, you don't ask the questions around here. I do. Understand! Second, we don't want guys like you in this town, drifters. Next thing we know, we got a whole bunch of guys like you in this town.”

Newsies (1992)

Why it’s leftist: Pro-Union

Given a hundred chances to describe an unapologetically pro-union movie, I probably would never guess “singing newsboy story.” Yet that’s exactly what this film inspired by an actual newspaper hawker strike of 1899 is.

The hawkers are gig workers, they have to buy the newspapers and then sell them. Any papers they can’t sell is a loss to them. When publisher Joseph Pulitzer raises the prices the hawkers must pay to get the papers, hawkers immediately form a union and go on strike.

The movie reminds us that without a union, an injured man can lose his job and possibly everything else. It shows a titan of industry sipping brandy in a mahogany room, moaning that he doesn’t have enough money--then deciding that the best way to get more is to squeeze his indigent hawkers. After all, that will help them build character!

The hawkers push back, sometimes literally. Pulitzer calls in the police to put down the strike, who are happy to oblige.

There’s usually not this much singing (OK, sometimes there is) but this is a pretty accurate way of how strikes often play out. Black Lives Matter protesters have frequently reminded us that police started out as slave catchers, but that was only really true in slave states. In Northern states, police started out as strikebreakers. In 1899 The Sun referred to police as “Blue coated agents of capitol.”

One criticism of the film: In the real world, sometimes newspaper hawkers were girls.

The Producers (1968, 2005)

Why it’s leftist: Anti-Fascist

Nazis are frequent stock villains in movies, why pick a musical comedy as a good example of an anti-fascist movie? There is a one word answer: aesthetics.

Fascists are very keen on appearances. They really want to be seen as badass or patriotic and they use clothing as a means to these ends.

As Lindsay Ellis explains in the video below, even if a movie is explicitly anti-fascist like American History X, fascists may watch it, ignore the message, and just revel in how cool the fascists look.

You know what fascists don’t like though? Springtime for Hitler. Because that song from The Producers makes Nazis look like dumb jerks. Fascists want you to think that they are very stable geniuses, but they’re not. They’re dumb jerks who get away with evil because no one takes them seriously till it’s too late.

Monsters Inc. (2001)

Why it’s leftist: Anti-Corporate

Corporations show up as villains in movies almost as often as Nazis, so what makes a silly kids cartoon particularly an anti-corporate? Well it’s not just that the titular corporation, Monsters Inc. is evil, it’s how it exists in society.

In the Resident Evil franchise the Umbrella Corporation is evil, but it keeps it’s unethical bio-engineering projects a secret from the public. Monsters Inc. is evil because it terrorizes children to generate energy. The thing is, this isn’t secret. Everybody knows they terrorize children and it is accepted. The film’s protagonists work for Monsters Inc. as professional terrorists. They mostly seem to get away with this because the children are foreign.

Another thing about the Umbrella Corporation is that the fact that the zombies they create keep getting loose and causing havoc is usually depicted as a bug in their operations. For Monsters Inc. terrorizing children isn’t a bug in their operation, its a feature. The whole system is built on terrorizing children and it doesn’t work without it.

Perhaps you’re thinking that a corporation whose business is based on terrorizing children is too cartoonishly evil to take seriously. Then I would say you haven’t heard of companies like Caliburn International, the British security company Serco Group, and Pacific Architects and Engineers. Because these companies are lining up to abuse children for profit.

Lord of War (2005)

Why it’s leftist: Anti-Imperialism

The film is the story of Ukrainian-American illegal arms dealer Yuri Orlov and is loosely based on true events. Yuri sells guns all over the world, shrugging off the war crimes he knows he’s helping to perpetuate. Along the way he dodges interpol agents, cutthroat competitors and dangerously unpredictable customers. I say this movie is anti-imperialistic because we come to see through the course of the film that as bad as he is, his impact is small compared to the arms sales by state actors. And in case you don’t pick this up, it’s explicitly stated at the end of the film.

Also it’s opening credits are an impressive short film in and of themselves

They Live (1988)

Why it’s leftist: Anti-Conservative everything

This is the most explicitly leftist movie on this list. Made as a response to the greed is good ethos of the Regan era, it depicts an America that has been secretly taken over by ghoulish aliens that are stripping Earth’s resources bare and purposefully causing global warming to make Earth more like their home planet.

The scene where the hero Nada puts on glasses that let him see the true nature of the world around him remains a disturbing piece of cinema for being pure fantasy and feeling chillingly real at the same time.

Yet for a film about alien invaders, They Live is particularly known for having one of the longest fight scenes in any film and it’s between two human characters. Nada tries to get his friend to put on the truth glasses, and his friend violently refuses. The fight goes on and on, why won’t he just put on the glasses? As Slavoj Žižek points out, it’s because the friend doesn’t want to see the truth. This film isn’t just anti-conservative, it’s also anti-moderate.

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